Ship structural materials

Requirements of ship hull material

The material for any engineered product must be one that can be economically formed or
processed into the produce and that will perform its intended function in service for a
reasonable, useful lifetime. Applying these general principles to a ship structure, we can
identify a number of specific requirements or properties of a material that make it
desirable for ship hull construction.
 Availability and cost: material must be readily available and relatively
inexpensive.
 Uniformity: the properties of the material must be uniform and dependable. This
is possible only when uniform and dependable. This is possible only when the
material is subjected to careful quality control during its manufacture, and when
the processes used in its manufacture are controllable and repeatable. Lack of
uniformity is one of the disadvantages of wood as a structural material.
 Ease of fabrication: the ideal structural material must be easily and cheaply
formed into different shapes (plates, rolled sections, castings etc) and easily cut to
size and joined together to build large, sometimes complex structure. The
fabrication should not significantly alter the properties of the material, so that its
desirable properties are retained. Joints between structural members should be as
strong as the materials being joined. This last requirement could not be met by
wooden ship structures or by riveted iron and steal structures. Since the
development of welding processes, especially the electric arc welding.
 Ease of maintenance: all materials are subject over a period of time to
deterioration in service because of their exposure to liquids, gases, chemicals,
radiation or temperature changes. The choice of materials for particular
engineering applications is frequently dictated by their resistance to oxidation,
corrosion, dissolution or thermal damage in service. For ship construction, there is
no cheap, readily available material that will meet all the demands of the ship’s
service life and that is not subject to corrosion or some other form of
deterioration. Therefore a measure of a materials effectiveness for ship
construction is the ease with which it can be protected against corrosion and
wastage by preventive maintenance and appropriate coating. The required
frequency and expense of painting the structure is an important consideration in
the choice of materials.
 Strength VS. weight: the strength of a material is an essential feature of any
structural material. A more important to-weight ratio. A high strength to weight
ratio is more desirable. Metallurgists have devised many alloys and processes to
increase this ratio, and the lighter metals such as aluminium, titanium, and
magnesium have much higher strength-to-weight ratios than steel. Unfortunately
all these materials are much more expensive than structural steel.
 Resistance to distortion under load. An essential requirement of a structural
material is that it submit to large without permanent distortion while remaining
elastic over a large range of loading. This characteristic is measured by modulus
of elasticity of a material.

1
Why steel is more preferred for structures?
Dia.

(i) When loaded to any point below the elastic limit steal has a very remarkable
property the deformation or strain caused by the stress is completely
recoverable when the load is removed, and the piece of material returns to its
original dimensions (elasticity). This is most desirable quality of a structural
material because a structure or machine part designed so that the elastic limit
is never exceeded will never deform permanently. Deformations while under
load will always be recovered when the loads is removed.
(ii) After mild steel is yielded with no increase in stress a point is reached called
yield overcome (YO) beyond which the steel again requires higher stresses to
deform any more. This remarkable characteristics of mild steel is beneficial as
a warning sign that the member has been overstressed, since it way deform
plastically and permanently in service and still not break.
(iii) Ductility is a very important property of structural materials, because in many
applications they must be shaped and formed by bending, thus causing plastic
deformation. Ductile steels can be deformed plastically without reducing their
ultimate strength. Specification for ship’s steel require that they have
percentage elongations in the range of 20 to 25 percent as measured in various
tensile tests.
The importance of ductility for ship steels become apparent when a rash of ship
structural failures took place many of them resulting in the ship’s breaking
completely in two quite suddenly. It was found that the cracks in question started
at sharp notches in the steel, that they took place only at low ambient
temperatures, that they took place only at low ambient temperatures, that the ship
steel failed by brittle fracture rather than in the expected ductile mode, and that
the energy required to cause the cracks was far below what would be needed to
cause a ductile fracture.
Research resulted in notch-tough steels that do not fracture in a brittle mode at
any temperature experienced by a ship in service. Toughness is a property that
implies high tensile strength combined with good ductility. The toughness of steel
can be improved by keeping the carbon content of the steel low (below 0.25
percent), by alloying it with controlled amount of manganese and sometimes
nickel, by a deoxidation process known as killing, and by limiting the grain size
during the steel making processes with the addition of aluminum and with proper
use of a heat treatment known as normalizing.