Modelling of Lake Waves to Simulate Environmental Disturbance to a Scale Ship Model

In the development of ship motion control systems, software simulations or scale model experiments in pools or open water are very often carried out in the verification and testing stages. This paper describes the process of building a software wave simulator based on data gathered on the Silm Lake near Iława, Poland, where scale ship models are used for research and training. The basis of the simulator structure is a set of shaping filters fed with Gaussian white noise. These filters are built in the form of transfer functions generating irregular wave signals for different input wind forces. To enable simulation of a wide range of wind speeds, nonlinear interpolation is used. The lake wave simulation method presented in this paper fills a gap in current research, and enables accurate modelling of characteristic environmental disturbances on a small lake for motion control experiments of scale model ships.