Investigation on the Structural Damage of a Double-Hull Ship, Part I – Ship Collision

Marine structure is designed to be able to resist various load conditions during its operational period. However, in design process, analysis of accidental loads, such collision and grounding, has not been included for both merchant ship and navy vessel. These loads are spontaneous and several remarkable casualties may occur after collision and grounding taking place. The aim of this paper is to investigate structural damage on the target ship during collision and grounding considering on failure process and damage extent. This work is divided into two parts which in the Part I, ship collision is discussed, and the Part II deals with interaction of ship structure with sea bottom in grounding. In the Part I - Ship Collision, condition of the side structure is observed, including the inner hull after impact which is considered as the key to determine safety condition of ship cargo. A passenger ship is modelled in this work and designated as the struck ship which will be struck by the striking ship in collision process. Resistance capability of the double-hull structure against side collision is evaluated. Virtual experiment is conducted by nonlinear finite element method in order to calculate several dynamic collision scenarios which are built based on physical parameter, namely target location. Based on calculation results, damage on the side hull is found to be highly influenced by relative height between two ships prior collision. Crashworthiness criteria are summarized and result tendency indicates that in the mentioned location, the striking ship produces larger tearing on the lower part of the struck ship. Contribution of each collision scenario on the resultant force is presented in later part in order to observe structural behaviour of each determined location in encountering side collision.