Abstract
Ships and offshore structures are exposed to wave and engine excitation loadings during navigation and cargo/ballasting operations. These excessive loads may cause damages to hull and may result loss of life the ship. Therefore, it is important to develop a system that allow accurate measurements of global hull loads. The objective of the study is developing a fiber optic monitoring system that is capable of monitoring, recording and warning of the vessel performance. A method for measurement of global loads on a vessel, using strain measurements from a network of fiber optic strain sensors and extensive finite-element analyses(FEA) with idealistic load cases, is presented. The method has been successfully validated on the idealized ship structure model with strain sensors.