Time series prediction of nonlinear ship structural responses in irregular seaways using a third-order Volterra model

To predict the nonlinear structural responses of a ship traveling through irregular waves, a third-order Volterra model was applied based on the given irregular data. A nonlinear wave–body interaction system was identified using the nonlinear autoregressive with exogenous input (NARX) technique, which is one of the most commonly used nonlinear system identification schemes. The harmonic probing method was applied to extract the first-, second- and third-order frequency response functions of the system. To achieve this, a given set of time history data of both the irregular wave excitation and the corresponding midship vertical bending moment for a certain sea state was fed into the three-layer perceptron neural network. The network parameters are determined based on the supervised training. Next, the harmonic probing method was applied to the identified system to extract the frequency response function of each order. While applying the harmonic probing method, the nonlinear activation function (i.e., the hyperbolic tangent function) was expanded into a Taylor series for harmonic component matching. After the frequency response functions were obtained, the structural responses of the ship under an arbitrary random wave excitation were easily calculated with rapidity using a third-order Volterra series. Additionally, the methodology was validated through the in-depth analysis of a nonlinear oscillator model for a weak quadratic and cubic stiffness term, whose analytic solutions are known. It was confirmed that the current method effectively predicts the nonlinear structural response of a large container carrier under arbitrary random wave excitation.