Parametric Roll Resonance Detection on Ships from Nonlinear Energy Flow Indicator

The detection of the onset of parametric roll resonance on ships is of a central importance in order to activate specific control strategies able to counteract the large roll motion. One of the main priorities is to have detectors with a small detection time, such that warnings can be issued when the roll oscillations are about 5°. This paper proposes two different detection approaches: the first one based on sinusoidal detection in white gaussian noise; the second one utilizes an energy flow indicator in order to catch the onset of parametric roll based upon the transfer of energy from heave and pitch to roll. Both detectors have been validated against experimental data of a scale model of a container vessel excited with both regular and irregular waves. The detector based on the energy flow indicator proved to be very robust to different scenarios (regular/irregular waves) since it does not rely on any specific assumption on the signal to be detected.