Estimation of directional wave spectra and hull structural responses based on measured hull data on 14,000 TEU large container ships

To ensure hull structural strength of container ships in association with their increase in size, it is very important to grasp the hull stress histories all over the hull structure in actual sea state. However, ordinary hull stress monitoring systems are insufficient for this purpose because of the small number of stress sensors actually practicable. Therefore, in this paper, we discuss an approach to reproduce the hull stress responses which are not measured based on the estimated wave spectrum from the limited measurement data. To achieve this, we introduce a new model to estimate directional wave spectra based on measured ship stress responses and ship response functions, and further we estimate other ship responses using the model. To model an arbitrarily shaped directional wave distribution, the 360° direction is discretized into 36 directions of 10-degree intervals instead of using a directional distribution function, and in each direction, the wave spectrum is represented using the Ochi (3P) spectrum with three parameters (average wave period, significant wave height, and kurtosis). The authors discuss the evaluation results based on two stress response combinations, and a comparison is made between the sea state estimates made by the proposed method and the ocean wave hindcast database (JWA). Furthermore, by comparing the significant values and the spectra of the measured response of the ship with the estimated response based on both the estimated sea state by the proposed method and the hindcast sea state, the accuracies of the proposed method and the hindcast method are discussed in terms of ship stress estimation at non-instrumented locations. •The proposed method performs well in estimating the location of the spectrum peaks in the directional wave spectrum.•The estimated significant wave height result has the same trend as the Doppler wave height sensor.•The estimated wave spectrum by the proposed method can reproduce the hull stress response better than the ocean wave hindcast database (JWA).