The objective of this work is to provide an overview of the ultimate strength assessment of ageing and damaged ship structures in the last decades. Particular attention is paid to the ultimate strength of plates, stiffened panels, box girders, and entire ship hull structures subjected to corrosion degradation, fatigue cracking, and mechanical damage caused by accidental loading or impact. A discussion on the effect of the cyclic load on the plate rigidity, re-yielding, and ultimate load capacity on the ship hull girder is also part of the present study. Finally, some conclusions and discussions about potential future work are provided, identifying that more studies about the impact of corrosion degradation on the structural behaviour of the stiffened panels and the overall hull girders are needed. Studies related to the dynamic collapse behaviour of corroded and damaged ship structures under time-variant load also requires additional attention.

This work reviews the ultimate compressive strength of aluminium plates and stiffened panels. The effect of boundary condition, initial imperfection, welding-induced residual stress and heat-affected zone are discussed. As the effect of manufacturing technology lacks in the literature, this effect is analysed employing the finite element method, considering the technology of welding and integrated extrusion. The numerical analyses have shown that the ultimate strength of the integrated extruded stiffened panel is relatively higher than the one of the traditional welded panel.

To further exploit the potential of marine composites applications in building ship hulls, offshore structures, and marine equipment and components, design approaches should be improved, facing the challenge of a more comprehensive and explicit assessment of appropriately defined limit states. The structure ultimate/limit conditions shall be verified in principle within the whole structural domain and throughout the ship service life. What above calls for extended and reliable materials characterization on the one hand and for accurate and wide-ranging procedures in structural analyses. This paper presents an overview of recent industrial developments of marine composites limit states assessments and design approaches, as available in open literature, focusing on pleasure crafts and yachts as well as navy ships and thus showing a starting point to fill the gap in this respect. After a general introduction about composites characterization techniques, current design practice and rule requirements are briefly summarized. Both inter-ply and intra-ply failure modes and corresponding limit states are then presented along with recently proposed assessment approaches. Three-dimensional aspects in failure modes and manufacturing methods have been identified as the main factors influencing marine composite robustness. Literature review highlighted also fire resistance and hybrid joining techniques as significant issues in the use of marine composites.

This paper re-evaluates recently published quasi-static tests on laser-welded thin-walled steel structures in order to discuss the fundamental challenges in collision simulations based on finite element analysis. Clamped square panels were considered, with spherical indenter positioned at the mid-span of the stiffeners and moved along this centerline in order to change the load-carrying mechanism of the panels. Furthermore, the use of panels with single-sided flat bar stiffening and web-core sandwich panels enabled the investigation of the effect of structural topology on structural behavior and strength. The changes in loading position and panel topology resulted in different loading, structural and material gradients. In web-core panels, these three gradients occur at the same locations making the panel global responses sensitive for statistical variations and the failure process time-dependent. In stiffened panel with reduced structural gradient, this sensitivity and time-dependency in failure process is not observed. These observations set challenges to numerical simulations due to spatial and temporal discretization as well as the observed microrotation, which is beyond the currently used assumptions of classical continuum mechanics. Therefore, finally, we discuss the potential of non-classical continuum mechanics as remedy to deal with these phenomena and provide a base for necessary development for future.

In this study, the technical papers on structural condition assessment of aged fixed-type offshore platforms reported over the past few decades are presented. Other ancillary related works are also discussed. Large numbers of researches are available in the area of requalification for life extension of offshore jacket platforms. Many of these studies involve reassessment of existing platforms by means of conducting pushover analysis, a static nonlinear collapse analysis method to evaluate the structure nonlinear behaviour and capacity beyond the elastic limit. From here, the failure mechanism and inherent reserve strength/capacity of the overall truss structure are determined. This method of doing reassessment is described clearly in the industry-adopted codes and standards such the API, ISO, PTS and NORSOK codes. This may help understand the structural behaviour of aged fixed offshore jacket structures for maintenance or decommissioning.

This paper focusses on steel-welded hemispherical shells subjected to external hydrostatic pressure. The experimental and numerical investigations were performed to study their failure behaviour. The model was fabricated from mild steel and made through press forming and welding. We therefore considered the effect of initial shape imperfection, variation of thickness and residual stress obtained from the actual structures. Four hemisphere models designed with R/t from 50 to 130 were tested until failure. Prior to the test, the actual geometric imperfection and shell thickness were carefully measured. The comparisons of available design codes (PD 5500, ABS, DNV-GL) in calculating the collapse pressure were also highlighted against the available published test data on steel-welded hemispheres. Furthermore, the nonlinear FE simulations were also conducted to substantiate the ultimate load capacity and plastic deformation of the models that were tested. Parametric dependence of the level of sphericity, varying thickness and residual welding stresses were also numerically considered in the benchmark studies. The structure behaviour from the experiments was used to verify the numerical analysis. In this work, both collapse pressure and failure mode in the numerical model were consistent with the experimental model.

This study explored the buckling of multiple intersecting spherical shells. A three-segment spherical shell was designed using the theory of deformation coordination; the design was compared with that of a volume-equivalent cylindrical shell and ring-ribbed cylindrical shell. The numerical results indicated that the buckling capacity of the three-segment spherical shell was superior to those of the other two cylindrical shells. To validate our numerical approach, three laboratory-scale shell models were fabricated. Each model was accurately measured and slowly tested in a pressure chamber; thus, the tested shells were studied numerically. The experimental collapse modes agreed well with numerical results, and the collapse load of the three-segment pressure shell was considerably higher than that of the two cylindrical shells.

Due to the complexity of installations and connections of subsea production equipment and the massive structures involved in a challenging environment, the failure of subsea production equipment could induce enormous loss to the safety and reliability of structures in addition to the cost of the oilfield development. One of the challenges that the subsea production structures face, as it moves to ultra-deep water and polar underwater equipment, is to design subsea shell structures capable of withstanding high external pressures. Hence, a subsea function chamber (SFC) has been lately proposed as a viable solution, which has a high level of safety and reliability, and a technique for the subsea production system. This paper presents a general and efficient buckling and collapse analysis strategy. In this work, the SFC is composed of cylindrical and hemispherical shaped steel material. Initial imperfection-based nonlinear buckling analysis has been carried out to investigate the buckling and risks associated with different thicknesses of the structure. Linear and nonlinear static buckling analyses have been carried out using ABAQUS software. By introducing the nonlinear properties of materials, the nonlinear numerical model of SFC is established. The effects of the thickness of different models and the number of stiffeners on the buckling modes are discussed. The wall thickness is calculated by the Donnell equation and Timoshenko’s classical method. It has been found that the classical solutions given by the Donnell and Timoshenko equations are more accurate for structures with larger lengths and diam. The thickness and number of stiffeners have a great influence on the ultimate buckling external pressure load of SFC structure

The aim of this paper is to develop computational models for the ultimate compressive strength analysis of stiffened plate panels with nonuniform thickness. Modeling welding-induced initial deformations and residual stresses was presented with the measured data. Three methods, i.e., ANSYS finite element method, ALPS/SPINE incremental Galerkin method, and ALPS/ULSAP analytical method, were employed together with existing test database obtained from a full-scale collapse testing of steel-stiffened plate structures. Sensitivity study was conducted with varying the difference in plate thickness to define a representative (equivalent) thickness for plate panels with nonuniform thickness. Guidelines are provided for structural modeling to compute the ultimate compressive strength of plate panels with variable thickness.

Nowadays, with the increasing operational life of ships, the aging effects on their structural behavior need to be investigated precisely. With the corrosive marine environment taken into consideration, one of the important effects of aging that must be studied is thickness degradation. In this paper, with the use of previously proposed equivalent thickness formulations for corroded plates, the progressive collapse analysis software HULLST is enhanced, and then, the effects of different corrosion models of uniform, random, pitting, and tanker pattern types on the ultimate and residual strengths of a floating production, storage, and offloading vessel hull girder are evaluated for the ages of 0 to 25 years. Results reveal that the uniform corrosion and random corrosion models have close outcomes. The value of relative reduction in the ultimate strength of ship hull girder (compared with the intact condition) ranges roughly from 6% for the age of 5 years to 17% for the age of 25 years in the hogging mode. The relative reduction in the ultimate strength ranges from 4% to 16% in the sagging mode. Pitting corrosion and tanker pattern (random) corrosion models lead to higher relative reductions in ultimate strength. The pitting corrosion model leads to a 16%-32% relative reduction in the ultimate strength for the ages of 5-25 years of the ship in either hogging or sagging. The tanker pattern (random) corrosion model leads to a 6%-37% relative reduction in the ultimate strength in the hogging mode and 3%-31% in the sagging mode at ship ages of 5 to 25 years.

The residual strength capacity of ship hull with full corrosion appearance in every structural member has been considered in a large number of research works; however, the influence of local corrosion on the ultimate strength and cross-section properties has not been taken into account and analyzed. Hence, this study aims to assess the effect of corrosion appearance in the flange section and web section on the ultimate vertical bending moment and several cross-section properties of a bulk carrier. To perform this task, a probabilistic corrosion rate estimation model and the common structural rule model are introduced and employed. The incremental-iterative method given by the International Association of Classification Societies-Common Structural Rules (IACS-CSR) is applied to determine the ultimate vertical bending moment, neutral axis position at the limit state, and other properties of the cross-section. The calculation results and discussions relative to the effect of corrosion on ship hull are presented.

The objective of this paper is to study the residual ultimate strength of box beams with impact-induced damage, as a model of what may occur in ship hulls. The bottom and side plates of ship hulls can suffer denting or fracture damage due to grounding, collision and other contacts during the ship’s service life and these impact-induced damages could result in considerable strength degradation. Box beams are firstly subjected to impact loading and then four-point bending loading is imposed on the damaged structures to assess the residual strength using ANSYS/LS_DYNA. The ultimate moment and collapse modes are discussed considering the effect of impact location. The impact-induced deformation is introduced in the four-point bending simulation, and the impact-induced stress is included or not to determine the effect of residual stress and distortion after impact. It is shown that impact location has significant influence on the residual ultimate bending moment of the damaged box beam providing that the impact energy is kept constant. The collapse modes also change when the impactor strikes on different locations. Damaged hard corner and inclined neutral axes might explain the reduction of ultimate strength and diverse collapse modes. The residual stress in the box beam after impact may increase or decrease the ultimate strength depending on impact location.

Classical structural reliability analysis of intact ship hulls is extended to the case of ships with collision or grounding damages. Still water load distribution and residual bending moment capacity are included as random variables in the limit state equation. The probability density functions of these random variables are defined based on random damage parameters given by the Marine Environment Protection Committee of the International Maritime Organization, while the proposed reliability formulation is consistent with international recommendations and thus may be valuable in the development of rules for accidental limit states. The methodology is applied on an example of an Aframax oil tanker. The proposed approach captures in a rational way complex interaction of different pertinent variables influencing safety of damaged ship structure.