A Physical-Based Damping Model of Gap and Moonpool Resonance in WAMIT

Abstract

An engineering model to estimate and incorporate quadratic damping of the piston-mode moonpool responses in the proximity of the piston mode period is proposed. The model provides a physical-based equivalent linearized damping coefficient. The method is not limited to forced motion, but applicable to freely floating moonpool vessels. Further, it is not limited to moonopools, but can be generalized to gap resonance problems, such as side-by-side operations. The soundness of the proposed physical-based method is demonstrated using the panel code WAMIT with a linear damping term in the free-surface boundary condition inside the moonpool using two existing moonpool experiments as case studies; (1) a two-dimensional rectangular box with a moonpool subject to forced heave, and (2) a freely floating offshore vessel in incident waves. The WAMIT computations using the proposed method reconstructs the experimentally obtained piston-mode and vessel responses well. We suggest that the proposed method can be used with fair degree of confidence in an early design or operational analysis phase, in the (often) case that the quadratic damping is not known from either experiments or CFD. To our knowledge, this is the first general, physical-based piston-mode damping model that does not require any tuning from experiments.