A CRITICAL LOOK INTO THE DEVELOPMENT OF SHIP STABILITY CRITERIA BASED ON WORK/ENERGY BALANCE

This paper puts forward the rationale behind the development of work/energy balance criteria, at the University of Strathclyde, for the assessment of intact ship stability and presents a critical comparison between them and the IMO weather criteria. It is shown that although the Strathclyde criteria represent a logical development of the weather criteria, there are fundamental differences between the two which must not be overlooked whenever a comparison is made. The main new feature of the Strathclyde criteria is the incorporation of time-varying restoring and excitation terms of ship dynamic properties into the stability assessment. The main conclusion is that the proposed criteria provide extra discriminative features related to geometrical and dynamic properties of the ship that are not revealed by criteria based on simpler methods.