SHIP IMPACT ON FENDERS. NUMERICAL MODEL VALIDATION USING EXPERIMENTAL MODELLING TESTS

Abstract

Marine fenders provide the necessary interface between berthing ships and berth structures (PIANC, 2002). Their absence can cause damage to either the quay or the ship or both the quay and the ship, endangering lives, and property. Due to the complex hydrodynamics around berthing ships, the characterization of the maximum force applied to an individual fender and the force distribution among a set of fenders is an essential factor in the design and safety of maritime structures and the fenders themselves, as well as for improving existing ones. This paper aims to describe a combining physical and numerical modelling of a ship impact on fenders, in order to improve the numerical modelling of this problem. Physical modelling represents a good practice in hydraulic studies, where a scale model is used to reproduce complex dynamic phenomena. However, the use of a sophisticated numerical model (or a package of numerical models) can provide a good means to evaluate the same complex physical processes and, in addition, to design and test a large number of alternatives in a short time span. Both types of models have their strengths and weaknesses (Gerritsen and Sutherland, 2011). Physical models provide a natural reproduction of complex non-linear physical phenomena, therefore they are well established and considered to be truthful. On the other hand, these models can be expensive and time consuming. In addition, one has to deal with the scale effect and measurement difficulties and errors are frequent. Numerical models in turn are very efficient to simulate rapidly many physical processes and the results can be easily extracted. On the other hand, to improve the reliability of their use in practice, it is necessary to calibrate several parameters through physical model measurements and field experiments. In order to take advantage of the potentiality of the two models emerged the composite modelling which is the integrated and balanced use of physical and numerical models (Gerritsen and Sutherland, 2011). This technique also costs but provides results with a better quality than those model techniques separately and increases the confidence in the use of numerical models. The physical modeling consists of a ship scaled model, whose impact on the fenders was performed in a wave basin. Various impact velocities and angles between the ship axis and the fenders alignment were used to represent possible collision conditions. The same conditions were reproduced by a numerical package. The numerical modeling was performed using MOORNAV (Santos, 1994), which estimates the ship motions and the forces exerted on the elements of the mooring system, namely mooring lines and fenders.