Evaluation of shipboard wave estimation techniques through model-scale experiments

Abstract

The paper continues a study on the wave buoy analogy that uses shipboard measurements to estimate sea states. In the present study, the wave buoy analogy is formulated directly in the time domain and relies only partly on wave-vessel response amplitude operators (RAOs), which is in contrast to all previous works that either are formulated in the frequency domain and/or depend entirely on RAOs. Specifically, the paper evaluates a novel concept for wave estimation based on combined techniques using a wave frequency estimator, not dependent on RAOs, to detect wave frequency and, respectively, nonlinear least squares fitting to estimate wave amplitude and phase. The concept has been previously tested with only numerical simulations but in this study the techniques are applied to model-scale experiments. It is shown that the techniques successfully can be used to estimate the wave parameters of a regular wave train.