Calculation of slowly varying drift forces

A new method for approximating time dependent drift forces in irregular, long or short crested sea is presented. The approximation is based on the assumption that the wave energy spectrum is narrow-banded. The drift forces may be computed from the spectrum or directly from a time record of waves by using Hilbert transforms. Numerical calculations are made for drift forces and corresponding motions of a floating box, and the method is compared to a commonly used method due to Newman. The two methods are found to agree very well.