Effect of pitting corrosion on local strength of hold frames of bulk carriers (2nd Report)—Lateral-distortional buckling and local face buckling

Pitting corrosion is typical corrosion observed on coated hold frames of bulk carriers which exclusively carry coal and iron ore. In order to secure the safety of these types of bulk carriers, it is important to understand the effect of pitting corrosion on local strength of hold frames.

In order to investigate this effect, a series of 4- and 3-point bend tests on structural models which consist of web, shell and face plates has been carried out. Artificial pitting was created on the web plate to simulate pitting. In the 4-point bend tests, two equal concentrated loads have been applied vertically at the one-third points of simply supported models so that compression load due to bending would act on the face plate. In this testing condition, lateral-distortional buckling occurred before reaching the ultimate strength and local buckling of the face plate was observed after reaching the ultimate strength. The effect of web plate pitting on the lateral-distortional buckling strength was found to be small but the ultimate strength decreases with increase in the degree of pitting intensity. In the 3-point bend tests, concentrated load has been applied vertically at the center of simply supported models so that compression load due to bending would act on the face plate. In this testing condition, local face buckling occurred just after reaching the ultimate strength. The ultimate strength is found to be decreasing with increase in the degree of pitting intensity.

A series of non-linear FE analyses has been performed to simulate the deformation behavior observed in the tests. It has been revealed that even in the case of randomly distributed pitting corrosion the ultimate strength of the structural models was almost the same as that of the structural models with uniform corrosion corresponding to the average thickness loss.