A Review of Ship-to-Ship Interactions in Calm Waters

Abstract

The hydrodynamic interaction between two or more ships in harbours or inland waterways is a classical maritime engineering research area. In ship manoeuvring practice, ship masters try to determine the speed and gap limit when a ship is passing or encountering others, particularly in confined water ways. This requires an accurate prediction of the interaction force acting on both ships. The pioneer experimental studies showed that the interaction could lead to a very large yaw moment and this moment is strongly time-dependent, which could make the ships veer from their original courses, leading to collisions. Based on the findings on experimental measurements, some empirical formulas are proposed in the literature to predict such interaction forces. However, these formulas could provide a satisfactory estimation only when the ship speed is quite high, and the water depth is shallow and constant. Numerical simulation overcomes this issue by simulating the ship-to-ship problem by considering the effect of the 3D ship hull, variable water depth and ship speed. Numerical simulation has now become the most widely adopted method to investigate the ship-to-ship problem. In the present study, the development of the methodologies of ship-to-ship problems will be reviewed, and the research gap and challenges will be summarized.

Ship Maneuvering in Shallow and Narrow Waters: Predictive Methods and Model Development Review

“…The CFD-based RANS can accurately predict flow details around the propeller in critical operating conditions. In addition, it is also used for shallow water problems, the squat effect and ship-ship interactions [21,[65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73]. In contrast to the static RANS methods, which are used for maneuvering problems in shallow waters, the CFD-based Unsteady Reynolds-average Navier-Stokes (URANS) methods are used for predicting ship behavior in heavy weather, such as rolling and course-keeping ability in regular and irregular waves in low and high seas [74].…”

State-of-the-Art Review and Future Perspectives on Maneuvering Modeling for Automatic Ship Berthing

“…The ship-ship interaction induces ship attraction, repulsion, and heel, and is affected by ship status (overtaking, head-on, parallel, and moored-passing), ship-ship distance, ship speed, water depth, and ship dimension and profile, and by secondary influences from the propeller and rudder [121]. The hydrodynamic interactions vanish when the longitudinal distance between adjacent ships is larger than twice the ship length [122].…”