On the second order effect of the springing response of large blunt ship

The springing response of a large blunt ship was considered to be influenced by a second order interaction between the incoming irregular wave and the blunt geometry of the forebody of the ship. Little efforts have been made to simulate this complicated fluid-structure interaction phenomenon under irregular waves considering the second order effect; hence, the above mentioned premise still remains unproven. In this paper, efforts were made to quantify the second order effect between the wave and vibrating flexible ship structure by analyzing the experimental data obtained through the model basin test of the scaled-segmented model of a large blunt ship. To achieve this goal, the measured vertical bending moment and the wave elevation time history were analyzed using a higher order spectral analysis technique, where the quadratic interaction between the excitation and response was captured by the cross bispectrum of two randomly oscillating variables. The nonlinear response of the vibrating hull was expressed in terms of a quadratic Volterra series assuming that the wave excitation is Gaussian. The Volterra series was then orthogonalized using Barrett's procedure to remove the interference between the kernels of different orders. Both the linear and quadratic transfer functions of the given system were then derived based on a Fourier transform of the orthogonalized Volterra series. Finally, the response was decomposed into a linear and quadratic part to determine the contribution of the second order effect using the obtained linear and quadratic transfer functions of the system, combined with the given wave spectrum used in the experiment. The contribution of the second order effect on the springing response of the analyzed ship was almost comparable to the linear one in terms of its peak power near the resonance frequency.