Structural Safety Assessment of a 1100 TEU Container Ship, Based on a Enhanced Long Term Fatigue Analysis

Abstract

This paper is focused on an enhanced integrated method for structural safety assessment of maritime ships under extreme random wave loads. In this study is considered an 1100 TEU container test ship, with speed range 0 to 18 knots. The most comprehensive criteria for ships structural safety evaluation over the whole exploitation life is based on the long term ship structures analysis, that includes: stress hot-spots evaluation by 3D/1D-FEM hull models, computation of short term ship dynamic response induced by irregular waves, long term fatigue structure assessment. The analysis is enhanced by taking into account the ships speed influence on hydroelastic response. The study includes a comparative analysis on two scenarios for the correlation between the ships speed and waves intensity. The standard constant ship speed scenario and CENTEC scenario, with total speed loss at extreme waves condition, are considered. Instead of 20 years ship exploitation life estimated by classification societies rules from the long term structural safety criteria, the enhanced method has predicted more restrictive values of 14.4-15.7 years. The numerical analyses are based on own software and user subroutines. The study made possible to have a more realistic approach of ships structural strength assessment, for elastic and faster ships as container carriers, in compare to the standard one based only on naval rules, delivering a method with higher confidence in the designed structural safety.