Abstract
Ships in bad weather conditions are likely to be subjected to accidental loads, such as high bending moment, collision, and grounding. Once she has damage to her hull, her ultimate strength will be reduced. This paper discusses an investigation of the effect of collision damage on the ultimate strength of a ship structure by performing a series of collapse tests. For the experiment, five box-girder models with stiffeners were prepared with a cross section of $720mm\;{\times}\;720mm$ and a length of 900mm. Of the five, one had no damage and four had an ellipse shaped damage area that represented the shape of the bulbous bow of a colliding ship. The amount of damage size was different between models. Among the damaged models, the damage in three of them was made by cutting the plate and stiffener, and in one by pressing to represent collision damage. Experiments were carried out under a pure bending load and the applied load and displacements were recorded. The ultimate strength was reduced as the damage size increased, as expected. The one with the largest amount of damage had damage to 30% of the depth, and its ultimate strength was reduced by 19% compared to the undamaged one. The pressed one has higher ultimate strength than those that were cut. This might be due to the fact that the plate around the pressed damage area contributes to the ultimate strength, whereas the cut one has no plate to contribute.
