Nonlinear Roll Damping With Coupling Effect in Regular Beam-Wave

Despite of numbers of method to estimate and predict the nonlinear roll damping, it is the mode least understood and the most difficult to determine so far. Reviewing the existing methods reveals that the coupling effects of other modes on roll motion are ignored by assuming just one degree of freedom (1DOF) roll in experiments. The new concept of Most Often Instantaneous Rotation Center - MOIRC proposed by Fernandes and Asgari has brough other parameters, which can help us to improve the roll damping analysis by including the coupling (roll-sway) that results in asymmetric roll responses. This paper, by describing experiments, aims to confirm this roll-sway effect on roll damping coefficient by taking a well posed 3DOF, which allows to follow the instantaneous rotation centers - IRCs. The regular beam-waves experiments were conducted for different frequencies and wave amplitudes. A 3DOF (sway, heave and roll) system identification is used to extract roll damping from the model test. It is shown that the locus of the IRCs follows a straight line and it has a statistical behavior whose probability density function of IRCs with a Cauchy probability density function. For the first time this characteristic is provided experimentally, well matching with the analytical Cauchy distribution.