Motion simulation of tug and barge during towing

I am using Ansys aqwa for the motion/rao analysis of the tug boat and barge during towing operation. My main aim is to get the path of the vessels, tension in the towing cable/ the force acting on the barge from tow cable during towing.When I insert tow cable and run hydrodynamic time response analysis in aqwa I am facing an error (Probably because tow cable is moving much from its initial position). Can someone please suggest me alternate method/softwares for this.

 

Hi! i can help you out if you still looking for help.

 

Hi,

I'm assuming you are doing a time domain simulation, not a frquency domain one. What you are trying to simulate is pretty complex and I guess most engineers would just estimate the cable tension based on the barges resistence multiplied by some factor to take the dynamics into account.

Orcaflex, from Orcina, is a software that is capable of doing what you want, as is Aqwa. However to get any meaningful results will take some hard work. Just to get the model to run and converge properly should be somewhat a challange if you don't have reasonable experience in the field. I would expect a lot of error messages before anything actually works!

Is this a student task or a actual job task?

 

Could you generate a linear model for the tug and another one for the barge, and then connect them with a spring to represent the tow line?

If Ansys can generate the models, you could do the coupled analysis in Matlab/Simulink. Matlab would also be useful for evaluating or designing the control laws on the tug.