Design loads for wave impacts -- introducing the Probabilistic Adaptive Screening (PAS) method for predicting extreme non-linear loads on maritime structures

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Probabilistic Adaptive Screening (PAS) method, which efficiently predicts extreme non-linear wave impact loads on maritime structures by combining statistical dependence modeling with multi-fidelity and adaptive sampling techniques.

Contribution

It presents a novel PAS framework that accurately estimates extreme loads with significantly reduced computational effort, validated across various non-linear impact scenarios.

Findings

PAS accurately estimates extreme load distributions within 2-15% of brute-force MCS results.

The method requires only 1-3% of the high-fidelity simulation time compared to traditional MCS.

PAS effectively handles both weakly and strongly non-linear impact problems.

Abstract

Wave impact loads on maritime structures can cause casualties, damage, pollution and operational delays. Consequently, their extreme values should be accounted for in the design of these structures. However, this is challenging, as wave impact events are both rare and highly complex, requiring both high-fidelity simulations and long analysis durations to reliably quantify the associated design loads. Moreover, existing extreme value prediction methods are neither specifically developed nor adequately validated for wave impact phenomena. We therefore introduce the new Probabilistic Adaptive Screening (PAS) method for predicting extreme non-linear loads on maritime structures. The method integrates copula-based statistical dependence modelling with multi-fidelity screening and adaptive sampling. This framework enables efficient extreme value prediction by statistically mapping low-fidelity indicator variables to high-fidelity impact loads. The method allows for efficient linear potential flow indicators to be used in the low-fidelity stage, even for strongly non-linear cases. Its statistical framework is validated against four non-linear test cases, including non-linear waves, ship vertical bending moments, green water impact loads, and slamming loads. It is concluded that PAS with optimal settings accurately estimates both the short-term distributions and extreme values in these test cases, with most probable maximum (MPM) values within 2-15% of the reference brute-force Monte-Carlo Simulation (MCS) results. In addition, PAS achieves this performance very efficiently, requiring in the order of 1-3% of the high-fidelity simulation time needed for conventional MCS. These results demonstrate that PAS can reliably reproduce the statistics of both weakly and strongly non-linear extreme load problems, while significantly reducing the associated computational cost compared to MCS.