Closed Form Modelling and Identification of Banking Effects in Confined Waters

TL;DR

This paper introduces a computationally efficient closed-form model for banking effects in confined waters, enabling real-time vessel control and safety analysis by accurately capturing hydrodynamic forces through physics-informed regression.

Contribution

It develops a novel, scale-invariant, first-principles model of banking effects validated with experimental data and advanced analysis techniques.

Findings

Model accurately reproduces measured forces and moments.

Coefficients are non-dimensional and scalable.

Validation confirms significance of banking terms.

Abstract

Vessels navigating in confined waters are subject to banking effects, which are hydrodynamic forces and moments arising from pressure differentials between the vessel sides, significantly affecting manoeuvrability and safety. Existing numerical approaches such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can accurately capture these effects but are computationally expensive and unsuitable for real-time control or estimation. This paper presents a closed-form, first-principles model of banking effects. The model coefficients are identified using physics-informed regression on towing tank experiment data for a scaled container vessel. Validation through Shapley value analysis confirms the significance of the banking terms in reproducing the measured forces and moments. Lastly, the derived coefficients are shown to be non-dimensional, making the model applicable across different scales that preserve vessel geometry.