INVESTIGATION ON HULL GIRDER ULTIMATE BENDING MOMENT OF CATAMARAN STRUCTURES

Abstract

The ultimate strength of a ship hull girder depends on geometric, material characteristics, boundary and load conditions as well as initial imperfections of plate and stiffeners. The ultimate bending moments of amid ship cross section are obtained from nonlinear finite element analysis (NFEA). A comparison between these results with tested box girder models under pure bending loading is also performed. As the small errors and they show that the advantage of model simulation, the NFEA can determine rapidly the ultimate limit state when laboratory cannot set up the experiments. This paper focus on the assessment of the ultimate bending moment of MST-3 box with various length of tested models and the effect of lateral pressures are also applied to catamaran hull structures. These results contributes the input data for catamaran structural optimization analysis.