Full-scale measurements of slamming loads and responses on high-speed planing craft in waves

Full-scale trials on a high-speed planing craft in waves were conducted to investigate the characteristics of slamming impacts and related rigid body and structural response. Measurements of acceleration, pressure, strain and global hull deflection were made in different sea conditions and at different speeds and headings. Low pass filtering is used to remove unwanted noise from the acceleration signals and extract the rigid body response. Methods for removing trends from the strain signals and identifying the peaks in the pressure and strain signals are established. Characteristic results including time series, distributions of peak values, averages of the largest 1/3rd and 1/10th peak values and individual impact events, are presented and discussed. The Weibull and Generalized Pareto models are used to describe the pressure and strain peak values and for estimating extreme loads and responses. Automated algorithms for fitting the statistical models to the peak value distributions are developed and the goodness-of-fit of the models to the data is examined.