Parametric Study for Assessment of Reaction Forces on Ship Docking Supports

The docking analysis of a global ship structure is requested to evaluate its structural safety against the reaction forces at supports during docking works inside a dry dock. That problem becomes more important recently as the size of ships is getting larger and larger. The docking supports are appropriately arranged in a dock to avoid their excessive reaction forces which primarily cause the structural damages in docking a ship and, up to now, the structural safety has been assessed against the support arrangement by the finite element analysis (FEA) of a global ship structure. However, it is complicated to establish the finite element model of the ship in the current structural design environment of a shipyard and it takes over a month to finish the work. This paper investigates a simple and fast approach to carry out a ship docking analysis by a simplified grillage model and to assign the docking supports position on the model. The grillage analysis was considered from the motivation that only the reaction forces at supports are sufficient to assess their arrangement. Since the simplified grillage model of the ship cannot guarantee its accuracy quantitatively, modeling strategies are proposed to improve the accuracy. In this paper, comparisons between the proposed approach and three-dimensional FEA for typical types of ships show that the results from the present grillage model have reasonably good agreement with the FEA model. Finally, an integrated program developed for docking supports planning and its evaluation by the proposed approach is briefly described.