The Leeway of Shipping Containers at Different Immersion Levels

TL;DR

This study investigates the leeway of 20-foot shipping containers at various immersion levels through field experiments and modeling, highlighting the importance of accounting for uncertainties in search and rescue operations.

Contribution

It provides new experimental data on container leeway at different immersion levels and evaluates the sensitivity of search area estimates to these levels and model parameters.

Findings

Experimental leeway data aligns broadly with semi-analytical models.

Search areas are highly sensitive to immersion levels and drag coefficients.

Ignoring crosswind leeway and uncertainties underestimates search area expansion.

Abstract

The leeway of 20-foot containers in typical distress conditions is established through field experiments in a Norwegian fjord and in open-ocean conditions off the coast of France with wind speed ranging from calm to 14 m/s. The experimental setup is described in detail and certain recommendations given for experiments on objects of this size. The results are compared with the leeway of a scaled-down container before the full set of measured leeway characteristics are compared with a semi-analytical model of immersed containers. Our results are broadly consistent with the semi-analytical model, but the model is found to be sensitive to choice of drag coefficient and makes no estimate of the cross-wind leeway of containers. We extend the results from the semi-analytical immersion model by extrapolating the observed leeway divergence and estimates of the experimental uncertainty to various realistic immersion levels. The sensitivity of these leeway estimates at different immersion levels are tested using a stochastic trajectory model. Search areas are found to be sensitive to the exact immersion levels, the choice of drag coefficient and somewhat less sensitive to the inclusion of leeway divergence. We further compare the search areas thus found with a range of trajectories estimated using the semi-analytical model with only perturbations to the immersion level. We find that the search areas calculated without estimates of crosswind leeway and its uncertainty will grossly underestimate the rate of expansion of the search areas. We recommend that stochastic trajectory models of container drift should account for these uncertainties by generating search areas for different immersion levels and with the uncertainties in crosswind and downwind leeway reported from our field experiments.