Experimental investigation of anti-roll performance of a ship with flap-type fin stabilizers in oblique waves at zero speed

This paper experimentally studies the anti-rolling performance of ship in oblique waves by using flap-type fin stabilizers. Without loss of generality, a standard model of S175 containership is made and the essential experimental devices including fin stabilizer system and forced rolling system are assembled to carry out the tank experiments. The Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm is used to control the movement of fin stabilizers by data driven and artificial intelligence technologies. The PPO model was trained with the help of the forced rolling device in an efficient and cost-effective way when the ship model was in calm water. Tank experiments were conducted for the ship in both regular and irregular waves with bow quarter oblique wave heading. The experimental results demonstrated that the developed anti-rolling scheme exhibits very good performance to reduce ship roll motion in oblique wave environments over a wide range of wave frequency conditions, which highlights the potential application values of the developed intelligent anti-rolling control system.