Experimental Study of the Impact of Drift, Depth, and Lateral Restrictions on Inland Ship-Induced Waves under Small and Moderate Ship Speeds

The study of ship-induced waves is essential to prevent bank erosion and optimize the ship’s maneuverability. Inland ship-induced waves are in general affected by many factors divided into ship related parameters (form, draft, speed, drift, and navigation environment parameters (depth, distance to banks, and offset of the sailing line from the channel middle). Based on a set of towing tank experiments, this article depicts the effects of a number of these parameters on inland ship generated waves. To account for real navigation conditions, the ship speed is chosen so as to comply with the regular range of inland navigation speed which is close enough from the maximum allowable speed supported by the experimental setup. To study the effect of ship form, the experiment was carried out on a containership, a pusher-barge and a pusher-two barges. The study is achieved for two different ship’s draft (T =0.1 m and T=0.04 m) and repeated for different configurations of water depth (h between 0.24 m and 0.12 m). The lateral confinement is studied by varying the channel width (W=2.88 m, 1.44 m and 0.72 m). Special attention is paid to the study of a restricted waterway combining both depth and lateral confinement. Besides, to identify the influence of drift, three drift angles were imposed (between 0 and 5°). Finally, the influence of the eccentricity is identified through varying the offset distance (offset = 0.44 m and 0.55 m). The ship wave maximum amplitude is validated by comparison to literature.