Multiple Ship Motion Simulation Code Correlation with Model Test Results Available to Purchase

The US Nav has developed a real-time multi-ship ship motion forecasting system which combines forecast wave conditions with ship motion simulations to produce a prediction of the relative motions between two ships operating in a skin-to-skin configuration. The system utilizes two different simulation methods for predicting ship motions: MotionSim and Reduced Order Model (ROM) based on AEGIR. MotionSim is a fast three-dimensional panel method that is used to estimate the Response Amplitude Operators (RAOs) necessary for multi-ship motion predictions. The ROM works to maximize the accuracy of high fidelity ship motion prediction methods while maintaining the computational speed required for real-time forecasting. A model scale experiment was performed in 2015 on two Navy ships conventionally moored together. The predicted relative ship motions from MotionSim and ROM were compared to the model data using three different metrics: RMS (root mean square) ratio, correlation coefficient, and average angle measurement (AAM).This paper provides an overview of the two methods for predicting the multi-ship motions, a description of the model test, challenges faced during testing, and a discussion on the methodology of the evaluation and the results of each code correlation.