Escape from a potential well under aperiodic forcing and damping with application to ship capsize

Escape from a potential well occurs in a wide variety of physical systems from chemical reactions to ship capsize. In these situations, escape often occurs by passage "over" a normally hyperbolic submanifold (NHS). This paper describes the computational implementation of an algorithm to identify the NHS of a two degrees of freedom model for ship motion under the influence of damping and aperiodic forcing. Additionally, we demonstrate how the stable manifolds of these submanifolds can be used to classify initial ship states as safe or unsafe.