Shallow water effects on high order statistics and probability distributions of wave run-ups along FPSO broadside

Abstract Ship hydrodynamics in shallow water becomes especially complicated since the nonlinearities in both the incident waves and the wave–hull interactions will be affected by the water depth. For a ship-shaped Floating Production, Storage and Offloading unit (FPSO) operating in shallow water, the broadside often suffers from the wave run-up and green water incidents in non-collinear harsh ocean environments. By applying the methods of ordinary moments and L-moments and the empirical Weibull distribution on the data measured in a series of model experiments, the high order statistics and the exceedance probability distribution of the run-ups along the FPSO broadside are evaluated and the effects of the shallow water depth and the incident environments are analyzed in this paper. It is seen that both the incident waves and the wave run-ups are non-Gaussian in shallow water and that the wave run-up characteristics are significantly influenced by the water depth and the incident environments, while the contribution due to the vessel vertical motions is negligible for the FPSO used in this study. The exceedance probabilities of the wave run-ups show that the broadside will be more likely to suffer from serious wave run-up and green water incidents in shallower water, in a higher incident wave and a non-collinear environment, especially so at locations around the FPSO midship within a range of 3/8 L pp  ∼ 5/8 L pp . The dependency of the shape and scale parameters of the wave run-up probability distributions on the locations and the environment is quantified by model tests. The present study leads to the conclusion that the wave run-up characteristics and the shallow water effects should be considered carefully in determining the wave loads and the freeboard of a large FPSO in non-collinear environment conditions.

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