Heavy trucks may have significant impulse loads on the moored ferry due to emergent sudden braking when truck move from linkspan to ferry deck. Therefore, its effect on motions of the moored ferry is studied in this paper to examine the ferry operations during loading and unloading processes involving the safety of cars and passengers.
The ferry crossing Thames river is moored by intelligent Docklocking System® (iDL), which is an innovative automatic mooring system replacing the conventional mooring lines. The feasibility and potential of this iDL system to minimize the horizontal movements of the moored ferry are presented in this paper based on numerical simulations of dynamic mooring analysis (DMA) in time domain.
The lorry impulse model is linked with a multi-body system including numerical models of the ferry and the jetties. Wind, current and wash wave are also considered, together with the impulse load of the lorry to represent a combination of possible loads. This paper first gives a systematic procedure to evaluate lorry impulse effect on moored ferry and then presents motion responses of the ferry moored by the iDL system.