Study on the safety assessment of free-fall lifeboat system

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Free-fall life boat is a newly developed evacuation system suitable for use in large merchant ships and offshore structures. Detailed studies on the boat motion and acceleration on boat hull during its water entry are carried out by using a newly-developed numerical-simulation method in which impact force is evaluated by a simple theoretical formula. A new launching system is then proposed as one of the main research results by this study.In addition to the study on the lifeboat motion, a study on the numerical simulation method of wave impact force is carried out by using a technique of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Comparisons of the computed results of impact force with the experimental ones confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed technique. The improvements achieved over the existing approaches are also studied.Basic studies on the bow flare slamming of container ships, which is a similar phenomenon to the water entry of free-fall lifeboats, are also conducted in this research.