Risk- and reliability-based approaches are increasingly being applied in assisting inspection and maintenance planning. One of the keys to such approaches is properly predicting the hull girder strength (HG) of gradually degradated hull structures. The development has been limited by the lack of data on aging ships—validation of the developed methods has not been possible. To fill the gap of knowledge on hull strength of ships in service, this paper presents a database of as-gauged hull structures and a statistical study of the time-variant HG of tankers. The expanded data set was collected from 2195 as-gauged girth belts (transverse sections) of 211 single-hull tankers that were 12–32 years old. It was intended to (1) provide actual data on hull girder section modulus (HGSM) of tankers, (2) investigate the general trends of the change in the HG over ships’ service life, and (3) propose formulations for presenting time-variant HGSM and coating life.
The data set demonstrated a high variation of HGSM that changed over time. The mean value and standard deviation of HGSM loss were derived as functions of time. The probability density function (pdf) of coating life was also derived. Comparisons were made between previous studies on HG and the current data set. It was found that almost all previous studies showed much greater HG loss than what this database revealed. The refinement of existing calculations appears to be needed. The data set and statistical study were expected to form the basis for validating formulations of HG that are key components in risk- and reliability-based approaches. 相似文献
In this paper, a novel systematic and practical methodology is presented for design of vehicle semi-active suspension systems. Typically, the semi-active control strategies developed to improve vehicle ride comfort and stability have a switching nature. This makes the design of the controlled suspension systems difficult and highly dependent on an extensive trial-and-error process. The proposed methodology maps the discontinuous control system model to a continuous linear region, where all the time and frequency design techniques, established in the conventional control system theory, can be applied. If the semi-active control system is designed to satisfy some ride and stability requirements, an inverse mapping offers the ultimate control law. At the end, the entire design procedure is summarised in six steps. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology in the design of a semi-active suspension system for a Cadillac SRX 2005 is demonstrated with road tests results. Real-time experiments confirm that the use of the newly developed systematic design method reduces the required time and effort in real industrial problems. 相似文献