Prediction of hydrodynamic forces on a moored ship induced by a passing ship in shallow water using a high-order panel method

A three-dimensional high-order panel method based on non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) is developed for predicting the hydrodynamic interaction forces on a moored ship induced by a passing ship in shallow water. An NURBS surface is used to precisely represent the hull geometry. Velocity potential on the hull surface is described by B-spline after the source density distribution on the boundary surface is determined. A collocation approach is applied to the boundary integral equation discretization. Under the assumption of low passing speed, the effect of free surface elevation is neglected in the numerical calculation, and infinite image method is used to deal with the finite water depth effect. The time stepping method is used to solve the velocity potential at each time step. Detailed convergence study with respect to time step, panel size and Green function is undertaken. The present results of hydrodynamic forces are compared with those obtained by slender-body theory to show the validity of the proposed numerical method. Calculations are conducted for different water depths and lateral distances between ships, and the detail results are presented to demonstrate the effects of these factors.