A Review of Methods for Modelling Flooding, Its Progression and Outcome in Damaged Ships

Abstract

The timely and precise prediction of flooding progression and its eventual outcome in ships with breached hulls can lead to dramatic improvements in maritime safety through improved guidance for both emergency response and ship design. The traditional approach to assessing damage-induced flooding in both these stages, which also fully complies with statutory rules, is through static calculations. On the other hand, the application of models that simulate the flooding progression and the behaviour of flooded ships from, or close to, first principles allows for increased accuracy of the modelling of the phenomenon. This increase in accuracy can then be used to support advanced design for safety procedures. Furthermore, it can considerably enhance a ship’s capability for damage identification and inference-based logic for emergency decision support systems and marine accident response in general. This paper conducts a review of selected state-of-the-art methods, procedures, and case studies in recent years which aimed to model progressive flooding and damage ship behaviour and provide some explanations of fundamentals. Applications related to damage identification, the prediction of outcome/situation awareness, and flooding emergency response are also briefly discussed. The paper concludes with a brief reflection on salient gaps in the context of accelerating the development of these methods and their applicability.