The Berthing of a Ship to a Jetty

A mathematical model has been developed that describes the behavior of a ship berthing to a jetty (or similar facility) and predicts the fender loads. Use is made of the so-called impulse response function technique that has as the restriction that the ship-fluid system is supposed to be linear and time invariant. This approach enables the inclusion of external forces of arbitrary nature. Maintaining all essential features it produces results of sufficient accuracy for practical applications. The mathematical model is applied to the case of a schematized ship that, on calm shallow water with relatively large horizontal dimensions, berthes—at zero forward speed—to an open jetty-type berthing structure equipped with one undamped (non-) linear fender without mass of its own. For verification experiments were carried out on a (small) scale model. The calculated results show a good agreement with values obtained from the experiments.