Development of wave-induced loads program for global ship hull strength

In recent years, the increasing size of merchant ships demands more precise calculations of global ship hull strength. Hence, accurate prediction of the wave-induced loads more significantly the vertical bending moment in violent seas has become inevitable for structural strength design. To develop an accurate prediction method, more detailed wave-induced local pressure distribution on the whole wetted surface of the ship hull needs to be calculated to obtain the integrated value of the vertical bending moment. For that purpose, some ship hull models are used in this study i.e. slender and blunt Wigley, and bulk carrier models. The 3-D linear frequency domain potential flow method is used to compute the wave-induced pressure and motions of a ship with forward speed in waves. We confirm the promising results of the integrated value of vertical bending moment in comparison with the real ships of bulk carrier model either from experiments and computation methods. In conclusion, this program is fast and reliable to compute the global ship hull strength at a preliminary design stage.