Analysis and prediction of slamming-induced loads of a high-speed monohull in regular waves

In recent years, an important trend in the shipbuilding industry has been the increase in the length and speed of high-speed crafts, thus demanding lighter structures. High-speed vehicles with their increased flexibility are more likely to be excited by impulsive loads, such as slamming, which has been extensively studied and discussed by the scientific community. Nevertheless, ship design still demands plain and reliable procedures (numerical and/or experimental) to evaluate the time-dependent global loads in structural dynamics. In this paper, the aim is to explore the possibility of combining the conservation of fluid momentum with the two-dimensional numerical estimation of the effective wetted length in order to improve the prediction of the impact loads without losing the simplicity and efficiency of analytical methods. In order to evaluate the prediction capability of the proposed formulation, the numerical computation of the slamming force is based on processing the model test data relative to the incoming waves and rigid-body motion, and the attained results are compared with the hydrodynamic force experimentally identified. The presented analysis is applied to the slamming tests in regular head waves of a segmented model, supported by an elastically scaled beam, of a fast ferry. By using the slamming load obtained with the theoretical model, the elastic response in terms of bending moments is computed and compared with that provided by direct measurement with strain gauges. Finally, the uncertainty analysis relative to both numerical and experimental results is performed.