Salvesen’s Method for Added Resistance Revisited

Almost 4 years after the appearance of Salvesen–Tuck–Faltinsen (STF) strip theory (Salvesen et al., 1970, “Ship Motions and Sea Loads,” Annual Meeting of the Society of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineers (SNAME), New York, Nov. 12–13), Salvesen in 1974 published his popular method for calculation of added resistance (Salvesen, 1974, “Second-Order Steady State Forces and Moments on Surface Ships in Oblique Regular Waves,” Vol. 22; Salvesen, 1978, “Added Resistance of Ships in Waves,” J.

Hydronautics, 12(1), pp. 24–34). His method is based on an exact near-field formulation; however, he applied the long-wave and the weak-scatterer assumptions to present his approximate method using the integrated quantities (hydrodynamic and geometrical coefficients). Considering the available computational powers in the 1970s, both of these assumptions were absolutely justifiable.

The intention of this paper is to disseminate the results of a recent study at the Technical University of Denmark, whereby the Salvesen’s formulation has been revisited and the added resistance is computed from the original exact equation without invoking the weak-scatterer or the long-wave assumptions.

This is performed using the solutions of the radiation and the scattering problems, obtained by a low-order boundary element method and the two-dimensional free-surface Green function inside our in-house STF theory implementation (Bingham and Amini-Afshar, 2020, DTU_- Strip Theory Solver). The weak-scatterer assumption is then removed through a direct calculation of the x-derivatives of the velocity potentials and the normal vectors along the body.

Knowing the velocity potentials over each panel, the long-wave assumption is also avoided by a piece-wise analytical integration of sectional Kochin Function (Kochin, 1936, “On the Wave Resistance and Lift of Bodies Submerged in Fluid,” Transactions of the Conference on the Theory of Wave Resistance, Moscow.).

The presented results for five ship geometries testify that the correct treatment of the original equation is achieved only after both of the above-mentioned assumptions are removed. Implemented in this manner, Salvesen’s method proves to be relatively more accurate and robust than has been generally perceived during all these years. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4050213]