Structural response and Material Failure in Ship Impacts

PhD thesis summary

erchant ship design confronts a great number of challenges set by the shipping community and international bodies, organisations and NGOs. The shipping community sets requirements relating to the ships' speed, load capacity, building and operational cost. Additional requirements relate to the safety of the ship as a means of transportation and that of the natural environment and man-built structures. The obvious reasons are the environmental impact and the loss of life by such a disaster. Further, financial consequences to ship-owners due to ship loss or penalties, and local communities due to the environmental impact, are also important. As sea routes are getting denser and ship speeds higher, there is a good possibility for a ship to experience a minor or more serious accident during her lifetime. Higher speeds may cause larger operational loads, like slamming, or excessively severe loads. Denser sea routes increase the possibility of an accident in particular a collision involving ships, shore or offshore structures. There are two complementary ways in dealing with ship collisions. The first one is to prevent accidents. This is achieved using on-board sophisticated surveillance and monitoring equipment and well-trained crews. The surveillance of sea routes, especially in high traffic areas near harbours, channels and offshore structures contributes significantly in minimising accident occurrence. A second aspect is to mitigate the effects of a potential accident. Such an approach deals with the development of structures that may tolerate damage within the safety limits for a particular ship, payload and environment. Naval engineers should be able to approach two major issues regarding mitigation: the simulation of ship collisions and prediction of the damage, as well as the identification of collision scenario or scenarios. For this, they should consider two sets of parameters, external mechanics, which include the motion of the ship or ships before, during and after the collision, as well as the effect of the surrounding water to these motions, and internal mechanics, which include the response of the structural components due to impact loads. This work focuses on the internal mechanics and more particularly on investigating the response of structures under impact loads, allowing for a realistic representation of the structural failure modes and material failure. In order to evaluate the influence of the parameters involved in collision simulations, a novel method is introduced, adopting efficient assumptions on the modelling of the impacted area and the rest of the ship. Test simulations address the problem of lateral collision between passenger ferries. From such simulations it is seen that the damage is localized. Also, that there are certain conditions, such as the impact of the bulb on the structure below the waterline, that highly endanger the safety of the struck ship. Such damage is possible, even for small displacements and speeds of the two ships, if a

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critical amount of initial energy is available to the system. Taking into account the complexity and effort that the development of large finite element models involve, it was natural to investigate the efficient boundary conditions that could be used on single tank models in order to reproduce such damages. A large series of impact simulations using parts of the struck ship is performed. The load path and failure results are compared to those retrieved from whole ship collision simulations. It is found that using a single tank clamped around its perimeter reproduces the governing loading condition on the side structure, which will subsequently cause failure and damage, namely membrane tension. It is also pointed out that damage is dominated by the material failure model and cannot be approximated adequately by the equivalent plastic strain threshold. Thus, a new element failure criterion should be introduced to finite element codes, which is mesh independent and has a strong physical justification. Failure criteria are explored and energy density failure theories are found to be the best fit as they are valid from microscopic scale, to macroworld applications. The T-failure criterion is chosen as the best candidate, which is further programmed as a user subroutine for Abaqus/Explicit. The T-failure criterion depicts the simple fact that a material volume may fail by either excessive dilatation or distortion. It uses elastic strain energy density quantities as a state measure. A methodology for calculating the threshold values for the T-failure criterion is devised using a combination of experimental data and finite element simulations. Torsion of hollow cylinders is used to calculate the threshold of elastic distortional strain energy density, TD,0, using mesh convergence. Tensile simulations, are used to calculate the threshold of elastic dilatational strain energy density, TV,0, by calculating it at the centre of specially designed flat tensile specimens. It is found that these failure thresholds have good agreement with theoretical predictions. The methodology is used for the simulation of metal forming processes of thin aluminium sheets and for the simulation of experiments of impact on structures, resembling to the double-bottom of small ships. In both cases, load paths and failure modes are in good agreement with experiments. It is found that the two-parameter configuration of the T-failure criterion is efficiently controlling the occurrence of certain failure modes in the simulations. Finally, the impact simulation on side tanks shows that this approach resolves the mesh convergence problem. The focus of this work is to give specific answers to the problems that inhibit the use of full ship collision simulations during the design phase of a ship. The limits of these simulations are explored: the localisation of the damage is such that realistic scenarios have to be stipulated in order to render the results of the simulations reasonable. It is difficult, if possible, to mitigate the impact of a high energy collision on a ship. This is a case that should be prevented, as the consequences are devastating. However, the structural arrangement could be improved towards sustaining low energy collisions that can potentially rupture a side tank. Such collisions are far more frequent. Apart from the immediate impact they have on the ship and the environment, they also pose a challenge for the integrity of the ship if it is not salvaged immediately. Thus, this is an area of research that has practical results. The proposed methodologies with respect to ship modelling, take advantage of two findings: much of the damage is caused before the struck ship starts moving and that the damage is localised. It is therefore proposed that instead of modelling complex phenomena such as ship motions and fluid-structure interaction, it is far more important to focus on the robustness of the side structures using local models. This is a method that is particularly suitable for stochastic simulations. Further, the material failure

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model is addressed. Here, an energy criterion using two thresholds is proposed that is shown to be far superior to the existing methodologies in describing the loading paths during collisions.

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