A Fatigue Design for Large Container Ship Taking Long-Term Environmental Condition Into Account

Abstract

In order to promote the reliable evaluation for the fatigue strength of ships, the validation of a direct load and strength computation was performed based on the tank test and the full scale measurement. The fatigue damage in short term sea state under various operation parameters was indicated quantitatively by the tank test in irregular wave utilizing the elastic model. The long term fatigue damage was evaluated based on the full scale measurement [1]. The fatigue damage inferred from the measured stress on deck structure is quite small compared with the direct computation utilizing a full ship finite element model. That is mainly caused by the difference of environmental wave condition. Moreover, the effect of operational condition through whole life was indicated by the direct computation quantitatively. To make more rational fatigue design, it is important to take the long-term wave condition into account.