Agitation models

Ports and harbors are intended to provide a calm moorage for vessel for purposes of loading and discharging cargo, passengers’ boarding and allow convenient maintenance of vessels. When designing a new harbor, one of the main requirements is to provide defense from open-water waves so that the mooring area will remain stable and still.

Each basin has such geometric parameters that may lead to amplification of specific waves that penetrate it. This phenomenon is known as resonance. Concentration of wave energy at certain frequencies may sometimes generates higher waves than outside the port. Thus, avoiding waves within a marina is more complicated than just providing protection from offshore waves.

When designing a port, an important step is to characterize which waves penetrate the harbor may lead to resonance as well as to examine whether those waves are typically at the harbor entrance area or may be formed by non-linear interaction mechanism. Analyzing wave agitation within marinas and ports is complex and only few companies possess this capability.

CAMERI holds vast experience in modeling the development of in-harbor waves and the resulting vessel motions at different mooring positions. CAMERI can help port designers to assess and improve their port layout design. CAMERI has performed agitation models for large scale ports, marinas and power plant pools along the east Mediterranean coast and was involved in their design process.

CAMERI has experience with different kinds of wave modeling: hindcasts using available wind data, near-shore wave transformation to deep water and from deep water to target points; Shoaling, refraction and diffraction effects close the shore and port’s elements.

With our knowledge, CAMERI can simulate the behavior of waves inside the harbor, finding its “weak spots”, comparing between alternatives and suggest ways to reduce the harbor’s agitation.