URANS prediction of berthed ship - passing ship interactions

In this paper, the unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes computational method has been employed for investigating the hydrodynamic interactions between berthed and passing ships. Initially, simulations in model-scale were performed for validating the numerical modelling technique using available benchmark experimental test cases. A formal study of verification and validation was carried out for quantifying the numerical uncertainties. Based on the validated numerical setup, systematic computations were conducted for further investigations on the influence of varying passing ship speeds and lateral separations on the interaction forces and moments. The same conditions were repeated in full scale to quantify possible scale effects. The numerical results demonstrate that the interaction forces and moments are proportional to the square of the passing ship speed and inversely proportional to the lateral separation between the two ships, which agrees well with the findings by Remery (1974) and Kriebel (1995) respectively. In addition, when comparing model and full scale results, the overall differences are not very significant and are within the simulation uncertainty for most cases