Reliability of Maintained Ship Hulls Subjected to Corrosion

Abstract

A time-variant formulation is presented to model the degrading effect that corrosion has on the reliability of ship hulls. The effect of corrosion is represented as a time dependent decrease of plate thickness that affects the midship section modulus. One repair policy was considered and the example results showed the effect of plate replacement when its thickness reached 75% of the original thickness. The example results also illustrated how the limit value of the thickness in the repair criteria influences the reliability and the decision about repair actions. This is also shown for the effect of different corrosion rates and allowable stresses.