Calculation of naval collisions with general use finite element software

Abstract

Collisions and groundings are contributing significantly to the structural damage of ships causing almost half of the total losses of ships. The capacity of computers and software made it possible to analyse collision cases as integrated formulation where movement equations are solved for ships’ structures and for the surrounding waters by applying general numerical methods such as the finite element method. In order to ascertain the quality of software used in collision calculations, generally there are used relatively simple structures made of stiffened plates which are very similar to the structure of vessel’s side plate. In this research, for collision calculus the software ANSYS which offers two main interfaces, ADPL and WORKBENCH. It was used a procedure of explicit dynamic calculus and ANSYS software is greeting the user and requesting only the input of total time of calculus/simulation. For the explicit dynamic calculus it was used the LS-DYNA software within ANSYS, which is a very reliable and fast solution. We are using calculations and measurements of a structure from the available literature and as a conclusion, we will note that there is a good correspondence between the three categories of results: measured, calculated in the literature and the one calculated with own means.