Application of Identification Techniques for the Improvement of Manoeuvrability Predictions

The interest in manoeuvrability problems has grown during the last decade, with the adoption by IMO of the RESOLUTION A.751(18) and contemporarily with the establishment by NATO NG6 of a Specialist Team with the aim of developing corresponding criteria for naval ships. From this increasing interest in ship manoeuvrability and from the analysis of the existing prediction tools and model testing techniques presently available, it emerges the need for the improvement of simulation tools in order to be capable of producing reliable and low cost predictions in early stages of design. The aim of the work presented in this paper is the development of a method to identify the hydrodynamic coefficients starting from standard test results of the wide available experimental data-base (sea trials and model tests) in particular, two different procedures for the identification of the hydrodynamic coefficients have been applied with good results to a test case.