Computation of Design Pressure against the Bow Bottom Slamming Impact

Ship’s bottom slamming has been studied by many researchers for a very long time. But still some ships suffer structure damages caused by the bottom slamming impacts. This paper presents a practical computation method of the design impact pressure due to ship’s bow bottom slamming. Large heave and pitch motions of a rigid hull ship are simulated by the nonlinear strip method in time domain and the relative colliding velocity between the bow bottom and the water surface is calculated using the simulated ship motions. The bottom slamming impact pressure is calculated as a product of the relative colliding velocity squared and the bottom slamming pressure coefficient that is obtained by modification of the SNAME pressure coefficients based on Ochi’s slamming experiments. Not only the bottom slamming pressures but also the required bottom plate thicknesses are calculated and compared with those of the classification society rules. The comparisons show good agreements and it is confirmed that the present method is practically very useful for the bottom structure design against ship’s bow bottom slamming impacts.