Practical considerations related to carrying out seakeeping trials on small fishing vessels

Over the last two years, the Institute for Ocean Technology (IOT) has participated in seakeeping trials on four small fishing vessels ranging in length from 10.64 m (34?11?) to 19.80 m (64?11?) as part of an effort to acquire full scale data to validate physical modeling methodology as well as numerical simulation tools under development. The project is just a small component of a larger initiative to understand and mitigate the health and safety risks associated with employment in a marine environment. Eventually, tools will be developed and validated to evaluate the number of Motion Induced Interrupts (MIIs), induced by sudden ship motions, and their impact on crew accidents to develop criteria to reduce MIIs. This paper describes the challenges associated with acquiring full scale seakeeping data on small vessels in the harsh North Atlantic environment. Typical results will be provided along with a description of the instrumentation suite, data acquisition system, test program and data analysis procedure used with emphasis on some of the factors that can degrade the correlation between ship and model scale data.NRC publication: Ye