An analytical and experimental study of shipping water evolution and related vertical loading

Abstract

Coastal, naval and offshore structures are exposed to the problem of shipping of water on their decks. Analytical approaches are useful for the shipping water research because of their practical implementation and low computational cost compared with numerical approaches. However, classical analytical methods tend to overestimate the shipping water amplitudes and derived vertical loading, disregarding the real tendency of the phenomenon. The present thesis aims to investigate the shipping water problem by alternative analytical and experimental methods that allow a better understanding of its evolution and generated vertical loading. The shipping water problem was modelled by the advection-diffusion equation. A convolution model, solution of this equation, was proposed to estimate shipping water evolution and derived vertical loads on deck of a rectangular fixed structure, considering frictional effects of the bottom in a practical way. An alternative experimental investigation was performed to validate the analytical approach. It consisted in generating isolated shipping water events in a systematic way using the wet dambreak approach. Obtained analytical results for water elevations and vertical loads presented good agreement with experiments, approximating the trends and maximum values of experimental time series, improving the results obtained with the traditional dam-break method.