An innovative EFD using FBG pressure sensors for ship seakeeping

This paper examines the acquisition of the measurement data of the spatial distribution of unsteady pressure on a ship advancing in waves. The purpose of the study is to investigate the reliability of the pressure data obtained by the unprecedented experiment and to provide experimental data of unsteady pressure which can be used for validation of arbitrary computation methods. The optical fiber sensing technology, so-called FBG (fiber Bragg gratings) sensing, is employed as the pressure sensors. In the experiment, 379 FBG pressure sensors (version 7; the latest version) in total are attached to the port side surface of ship model and also ordinary strain-type pressure sensors are embedded in the starboard side for validating reliability of FBG pressure sensors by comparing both results. In addition to the pressure distribution, measurement is made for unsteady hydrodynamic forces such as added mass, damping coefficients, and wave exciting forces, and also for ship motions and added resistance. Most of the measurement is repeated at least five times for each condition, and results of measured pressures are evaluated with mean value and standard deviation. Regarding the added resistance, the distribution for estimating added resistance is also extracted from obtained pressure distribution and its pressure contour is illustrated to show visually which hull region affects the added resistance significantly. Validation of the measured pressure with FBG pressure sensors is carried out also by integrating measured pressures over the ship model surface and comparing it with forces directly measured with load cells. The measured pressure distribution is compared with typical calculation results with the Rankine panel method in frequency domain to demonstrate usefulness of the spatial pressure data for validating the calculation method. Through these studies, it is confirmed that the measured unsteady pressures with FBG pressure sensors are accurate enough and valuable as the validation data for any calculation method.