Combined stochastic lateral and in-plane loading of a stiffened ship panel leading to collapse

Abstract

With harshening ocean environments and the push to extend the service life of vessels and platforms, lifetime structural design performance is an increasingly important factor to differentiate between design options. But despite many advancements in structural modeling, reliability analysis may still be too time consuming and computationally expensive to be employed for local design choices. Reliability analysis for stiffened ship panels is additionally complicated as the collapse mechanism is due to combined stochastic lateral and in-plane loading effects [1]. This paper employs the non-linear Design Loads Generator (NL-DLG) process [2] to efficiently estimate the probability of stiffened ship panel collapse while retaining the wave profiles which lead to lifetime responses. This information allows a direct comparison between panel options and highlights critical panel parameters which are strongly related to design robustness. The resulting ensemble of short NL-DLG wave profiles lead to similar statistical characteristics of the panel designs as do brute-force Monte Carlo Simulations, but reduce the required simulation time by a factor of nearly 87,000 for the same number of simulations. These directed wave profiles offer naval architects the opportunity to efficiently examine rare complex structural responses by linking high-fidelity structural and hydrodynamic models. The potential of the NL-DLG process is that relevant information about complex marine structures, even those with limit surfaces excited by combined non-Gaussian loading, can be obtained efficiently and in earlier stages of the design process via low-order surrogate models.