The contribution of horizontal bending and warping stress to the total fatigue accumulation of containerships

Paper in proceeding, 2014

Due to the special structural characteristics of containerships, such as the slender structure and large hull opening, the horizontal bending moment and torsion play an important role in ships’ structural safety, where the fatigue failure is one of the most significant structural failure modes. Unfortunately, for the super large container ships, there is no experience about stress distributions available to guide the ship’s fatigue design. Therefore, the fatigue loads have to be computed by a direct calculation method. In order to estimate ship’s fatigue damage due to the horizontal bending and torsion, depending on the complexity of computation methods, it might be very time consuming to compute ship structural stresses for all possible sea conditions. Through the comparison of different hydrodynamic and structural analysis methods with the full-scale measurements of two different sizes of containerships, this paper is targeted to study how much fatigue damages are caused by the vertical bending, horizontal bending induced stress, in particular the contribution from warping stress from different structural details in containerships. It is expected to give a reference to the reliable fatigue assessment concerning horizontal bending and warping stresses for containership structures.