Fatigue crack propagation and computational remaining life assessment of ship structures

The fitness for serviceability of structural members of marine structures in which fatigue cracks might be found during in-service inspection is investigated in order to prevent instantaneous failures of ships, as well as a loss of serviceability such as the oil- and/or watertightness of critical compartments. The essential features of fatigue crack propagation and the remaining life assessment are discussed in the first part of the paper, where the effects of weldment, complicated stress distributions including stress biaxialities at three-dimensional structural joints, structural redundancy, and crack curving are found to be of primary importance. The second part of the paper contains a discussion of an advanced numerical simulation method for the remaining life assessment, in which the above-mentioned effects of fatigue crack propagation are taken into account. The simulated crack paths and the fatigue crack propagation lives are found to be in fairly good agreement with the experimental results.     

Analysis of the accident of the MVNakhodka. Part 2. Estimation of structural strength

In the early morning of January 2, 1997, a Russian tanker, the MVNakhodka, broke in two in the Sea of Japan. The fore part of the vessel drifted and was stranded on the coast of Japan, and the aft part sank. The coast of Japan was seriously polluted by spilled heavy oil. Following this disaster, the Japanese Government established a Committee for the Investigation of the Causes of the Casualty of theNakhodka. This paper deals with the structural strength of MVNakhodka at the time of the accident. First the structural characteristics of theNakhodka are described, and the reduction in thickness of the structural members are estimated based on the data measured on the fore part of the vessel which drifted ashose. Then the ultimate longitudinal strength of the hull girder at the time of the accident is evaluated by applying Smith's method, and the possibility of break-up collapse due to excess loads is discussed. The mechanism of fracture at the bottom plate is also discussed based on the observed fracture surfuce of the cross section. Finally an FEM (finite element method) simulation of the break-up of the hull girder is performed. It is shown that buckling/plastic collapse took place at the deck plate near Fr.153, which was followed by the successive buckling collapse of the side shell plate of the hull girder. Right after the collapse of the deck structure, the bottom plate fractured just in front of the transverse bulkhead at Fr.153. This article is based on an article that appeared in Japanese in the Journal of the Society of Naval Architects of Japan, vol. 183 (1998).     

Strength and deformability of corroded steel plates under quasi-static tensile load

The objective of this study was to estimate the strength and deformability of corroded steel plates under quasi-static uniaxial tension. In order to accurately simulate this problem, we first estimated the true stress–strain relationship of a flat steel plate by introducing a vision sensor system to the deformation measurements in tensile tests. The measured true stress–stain relationship was then applied to a series of nonlinear implicit three-dimensional finite element analyses using commercial code LS-DYNA. The strength and deformability of steel plates with various pit sizes, degrees of pitting intensity, and general corrosion were estimated both experimentally and numerically. The failure strain in relation to the finite element mesh size used in the analyses was clarified. Two different steels having yield ratios of 0.657 and 0.841 were prepared to examine the material effects on corrosion damage. The strength and deformability did not show a clear dependence on the yield ratios of the present two materials, whereas a clear dependence was shown with respect to the surface configuration such as the minimum cross-sectional area of the specimens, the maximum depth of the pit cusp from the mean corrosion diminution level, and pitting patterns. Empirical formulae for the reduction of deformability and the reduction of energy absorption of pitted plates were proposed which may be useful in strength assessment when examining the structural integrity of aged corroded structures.     

On the water impact and elastic response of a flat plate at small impact angles

It is well known that Wagner's theory for the impact between a flat body and a water surface cannot be applied to very small impact angles because of the effects of the trapped air. We focus our attention on the impact problem with a small impact angle, which has not been studied in detail owing to theoretical and experimental difficulties. In order to investigate the transitional impact behavior from a trapped-air impact to a Wagner-type impact, we carried out precise pressure and strain measurements by dropping a plate and increasing the impact angle, β, from 0° to 4° by increments of 0.5°. Based on the experimental results, the time histories of the measured pressures were identified as belonging to three patterns: the Wagner type, the trapped-air type, and the intermediate type. During the transitional impact process, the Wagner-type pattern was observed near the keel at the beginning of the impact, with the trapped-air pattern toward the edge of the plate. The Wagner-type pressure pattern dominated with increasing impact angle. Although high peak pressures appeared in the transitional impact process, the maximum strains measured in the plate were not so sensitive to the impact angle. It was found that the structural response can be estimated by using the average pressure at impact, which leads to a new design approach for small impact angles.     

Motorcycle-based adolescents’ travel behaviour during the school morning commute and the effect of intra-household interaction on departure time and mode choice

We hypothesise that intra-household interaction influences home departure time and mode choice for the morning commute. In Indonesia, over 71% of vehicles on the road are motorcycles. This fact increases the significance of household interaction in influencing transport mode choice since the simplicity of the motorcycle allows a great degree of versatility in regard to multiple family member transport. To emphasise this point, our study focuses on the unique travel behaviour of adolescents during the school morning commute which, due to the use of the motorcycle, is a combination of the travel behaviour of accompanied children and escorting adults. Our study discovers that adolescents are likely to shift their school arrival time very early or close to the designated starting time in relation to motorcycle-based parental escort to school. In regard to mode choice, adolescent students prefer to be escorted by motorcycle rather than take public transport.     

Multi-scale modeling of fatigue crack propagation applied to random sequence of clustered loading

Fatigue crack propagation in marine structures is obviously governed by mechanics of the considerably different four levels of multi-scale problems. Problems of structural response to environmental loads have length scale of several hundred meters, whereas possible detectable size of cracks from initial defects in a weld is of the order of millimeters. Once a fatigue crack initiates, crack tip plasticity is of the order of several grain sizes, while the resulting fatigue crack growth in each load cycle is of the order of nanometers. In our previous work, the first author and their associates have developed the so-called CP-System, which can treat the first two multi-level problems as an integrated system. Furthermore, we have incorporated the third level of mechanics by using the stress intensity range corresponding to the repeated tensile plastic deformation ahead of the crack tip. In the present paper, we shall discuss a more rational integral equation-based formulation in order to integrate the third and fourth levels of micro-mechanics to the first two levels of continuum mechanics.The method is then applied to fatigue crack propagation under the effects of random sequence of clustered loading. As an example of the random sequence of clustered load, we shall use the so-called “storm model”. In the crack propagation simulation, we have to take into account of the plastic wake on the crack surfaces, whose thicknesses are influenced by the material parameters involved in the crack growth model. These parameters are first identified by the fatigue tests under combined constant and random loading using a CT specimen. Then, fatigue crack growth is investigated by numerical simulation and fatigue tests for various random sequences of clustered loading. The experimental and numerical results agree quite well with each other, and fatigue crack propagation is found to be considerably retarded under random sequence loading, so that the conventional equivalent stress approach may provide rather conservative results to the real seaway loading.     

Simulation-based fatigue crack management of ship structural details applied to longitudinal and transverse connections

It is of continuing importance for ship structural design to establish a system to compute the growth behavior of fatigue cracks propagating in structural details. In the present paper, a simulation program is developed for multiple fatigue cracks propagating in a three-dimensional stiffened panel structure, where it can predict fatigue crack lives and paths by taking into account the interaction of multiple cracks, load shedding during crack propagation and welding residual stress. Various fatigue crack propagations in longitudinal stiffeners of ship structures are investigated by both the present simulation method and experiments. From these results, it is found that the crack propagation may considerably change, depending on the loading conditions, structural details and residual stress distributions. This means that one could possibly manage to avoid fatal damage of the skin-plate by properly designing the structural details. Furthermore, these results may imply a possibility to realize a rational fatigue crack management if one can estimate the fatigue crack-propagation behavior during the ship lifecycle. The present simulation program may offer a useful numerical tool for this purpose.     

Fracture control of extremely thick welded steel plates applied to the deck structure of large container ships

The rapid enlargement of the size of container ships has led to the application of extremely thick plate in the deck structures, which may grow concerns about the fracture toughness at the butt-weld with large amount of heat input, and the arrest toughness of brittle crack propagation in the base metal of such thick plates. Also, slam-induced whipping stresses might affect the fatigue crack propagation and the initiation of a brittle crack in a container ship. In order to prevent the catastrophic failure of deck structures by brittle fracture, national joint research projects, which focused on the safety-related issues of extremely thick steel plate applied to hull of large container ships, were formed from April 2007 to March 2011 organized by the Japan Ship Technology Research Association (JSTRA) supported by the Japanese Government in collaboration with universities, national research institute, classification societies and relevant industries including shipbuilding, steel manufacturing and shipping companies. The joint research projects have carried out the investigations on crack initiation toughness of the weld, fatigue crack propagation under seaway loading, the potential of defect detection by ultrasonic testing, and the crack-arrest methods after brittle crack propagation. Practical recommendations to prevent brittle fracture of large container ships were proposed based on these comprehensive investigations. The essential parts of the above research activities are presented in this paper.     

A computational approach for fatigue crack propagation in ship structures under random sequence of clustered loading

The authors have developed a simulation program, CP-System, for multiple cracks propagating in a three-dimensional stiffened panel structure, where through-the-thickness crack propagation is formulated as a two-dimensional in-plane problem, and the crack propagation behavior is simulated by step-by-step finite element analyses. In order to evaluate the fatigue lives of marine structures accurately, it is necessary to take into account the load histories induced by sea waves, which may be composed of a random sequence of certain clustered loads with variable stress range. In the proposed crack growth model, the crack opening and closure behavior is simulated by using the modified strip yielding model, and the effective tensile plastic stress intensity range, ΔK _RP, is calculated by considering the contact of plastic wake along the crack surfaces. The adequacy of the proposed crack growth model is examined by comparison with fatigue tests under non-constant-amplitude loading. The usefulness of the developed method is demonstrated for a ship structural detail under certain simulated load sequences. It is shown that the fatigue crack growth of a ship structure is significantly retarded due to the load interaction effects, so that the conventional method for fatigue life assessment may predict a relatively conservative fatigue life of a structure.     

Numerical weight function method for the structural analysis of ships: a speedy direct calculation with condensed structural information

The weight function method was originally derived for crack problems to calculate stress intensity factors for arbitrary loading conditions. In this article, a numerical weight function method has been extended to formulate the structural response analyses of two-dimensional elasticity, plate-bending, and three-dimensional plate-structures by using the finite-element method. The solution procedure is based on the well-known Maxwell–Betti reciprocal theorem, which is applied to the original and properly defined auxiliary problems. The present numerical weight function may be considered as a finite-element version of a Green’s function in an integral equation solution scheme. Although ship structures are certainly analysed by the finite-element method in a practical design procedure, the weight function approach has not yet been realized. The method is very useful for the analysis of structures subjected to a vast range of loading conditions, because structural responses can simply be calculated by the inner product of the universal weight function and load vectors. The validity and convergence characteristics of the present method are investigated by two-dimensional elastic and plate-bending problems, respectively. Finally, the method is applied to the calculation of the response amplitude operator of a stress component at a critical structural detail of a double-hull tanker, and the speed and efficiency of the method are quantitatively discussed based on the practical results.