The Consequence Method: An Approach for Estimating Roll Damping in Transportation Fatigue Analyses
In order to compute fatigue damage during offshore transports it is necessary to assume a description of the sea states encountered during the voyage. In recent years, it has become a common approach to apply directional long-term scatter diagrams for the transportation route, taking into account vessel speed, course and time of year for the departure. An important contribution to the transportation fatigue damage is usually the wave induced inertia load. For ship shaped vessels additional viscous damping needs to be included in order to estimate correct roll response. However, since viscous roll damping is non-linear, correct estimation of fatigue damage can only be obtained by computing partial damage for all individual sea states in the scatter diagram. This becomes very time-consuming and is usually not done. Instead, the roll damping level is tuned to match typical mean sea states in the scatter diagram. The roll damping will then be too low for higher sea states and too large for smaller sea states. When choosing the roll damping level, the aim should be to obtain an overall error in transportation fatigue damage which is minimized. This paper describes a method to estimate a representative viscous roll damping level for transportation fatigue analyses.