SPH simulation of ship behaviour in severe water-shipping situations

•We apply an open-source SPH solver of DualSPHysics to the prediction of water-shipping problems.•SPH results are compared with dedicated captive and free motion tests for a simplified ship model.•SPH method well predicts hydrodynamic forces and ship dynamic behaviour in severe water-shipping situations.•SPH simulation using GPU has good potential for ship safety assessment against water-shipping events.

Fishing vessels, having relatively small freeboard, are prone to encounter a water-shipping event in severe sea states. The water impact and accumulated water effects could make fishing vessels be unstable and capsize in the worst-case scenario. Therefore securing the safety of fishing vessels under water-shipping situations is an important subject, but it is not easy to predict the water behaviour in water-shipping situations, where over-topping, water impact, largely deformed free-surface and strong coupling with ship motions appear compositely. In this paper, SPH simulations using GPU are applied to the prediction of 6DoF ship motions in severe water-shipping condition. Then the prediction accuracy of the SPH method is systematically investigated through comparisons with dedicated captive and free motion tests.