The Applicability of SPH Technique for the “Water on Deck” Problem of Ro-Ro Ships

After several fatal scenarios involving Ro-Ro passenger ships safety, the attention of the rulemaking environment has focused, in case of damage, on the flooding threat of large unlimited spaces on garage decks. The need for further nvestigations on the matter is continuously put in evidence by the several bodies involved in the rulemaking process. For the development of a numerical approach, the presence of large free surfaces and the wide geometry of a garage deck induce to consider Lagrangian techniques as a suitable tool that seems to be able, in principle, to deal properly with the characteristics of these problems and to overcome critical issues like the modelling of the water ingress/egress and the effects of accumulation of water on deck. In this paper we will focus our attention over the SPH (Smoothed Particles Hydrodynamics) technique, developed for the first time in 1977 by Gingold, Monaghan and Lucy. [1,2] Following the experience derived from some benchmark cases, we’ll try to put in evidence the problems/advantages for the application to Ro Ro ships in case of garage flooding.