CONTROLLING THE PARAMETRIC ROLL OF A CONTAINER SHIP MODEL BY CHANGING THE HEADING ANGLE

Parametric roll on ships is an auto-parametric resonance phenomenon whose onset causes a sudden rise in roll oscillations leading to dangerous situations for the ship, the cargo and the crew. In the paper, we have numerically investigated the effect of modifying the heading angle on the roll amplitudes. We followed three strategies. In the first, we allowed the heading angle to decrease with a constant angular acceleration so that the encounter frequency has left the dangerous region of the resonance. However, this option involves changing the course of the ship in the long run, which is of course a shortcoming. In the second strategy, we changed the heading angle up and down around an average value that generates large roll amplitudes, by using different periodic sinusoidal or triangular profiles. The beneficial effect of this action is to keep the course, even if at the cost of a momentary delay. We noticed that both control techniques listed above generally managed to significantly reduce the roll amplitudes if certain thresholds have been exceeded. As a last idea for decreasing the parametric roll amplitudes, we used the combined effect of ship forward speed and heading angle change.