Copyright © 2012 S. L. Han and Takeshi Kinoshita. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The nonlinear responses of ship rolling motion characterized by a roll damping moment are of great interest to naval architects and ocean engineers. Modeling and identification of the nonlinear damping moment are essential to incorporate the inherent nonlinearity in design, analysis, and control of a ship. A stochastic nonparametric approach for identification of nonlinear damping in the general mechanical system has been presented in the literature (Han and Kinoshits 2012). The method has been also applied to identification of the nonlinear damping moment of a ship at zero-forward speed (Han and Kinoshits 2013). In the presence of forward speed, however, the characteristic of roll damping moment of a ship is significantly changed due to the lift effect. In this paper, the stochastic inverse method is applied to identification of the nonlinear damping moment of a ship moving at nonzero-forward speed. The workability and validity of the method are verified with laboratory tests under controlled conditions. In experimental trials, two different types of ship rolling motion are considered: time-dependent transient motion and frequency-dependent periodic motion. It is shown that this method enables the inherent nonlinearity in damping moment to be estimated, including its reliability analysis.