Influence of Breaking Waves and Wake Bubbles on Surface-Ship Wake Scattering at Low Grazing Angles

A surface-ship wake model is proposed for calculating the scattering of ship wake from a nonlinear sea surface at a high sea state. Ship waves are simulated based on the Kelvin wave model by the point-source method. A Creamer II sea surface based on the Elfouhaily sea spectrum is generated, and breaking waves and foam layer effects are taken into account for the background sea scattering at slight, moderate and high wind speeds. Turbulent bubbles scattering from the ship, which is different from wind-driven bubble breaking, is taken into account with a different concentration distribution using a polynomial fitting function combined with measured data. The surface-ship wake scattering is presented for different wind speeds. Numerical simulations show that ship wake scattering results will be higher when wake bubbles are taken into account. The ship beam is a key parameter that influences the width of the turbulent wake, and results in different scattering characteristics on the scattering image. The wind-induced surface in the presence of breaking waves and whitecaps results in scattering enhancement. This will cause the ship wake signal to be submerged in the back-ground of sea noise, leading to false alarms.