Application of aerospace structural models to marine engineering

The large container ships and fast patrol boats are complex marine structures. Therefore, their global mechanical behaviour has long been modeled mostly by refined beam theories. Important issues of cross section warping and bending-torsion coupling have been addressed by introducing special functions in these theories with inherent assumptions and thus compromising their robustness. The 3D solid Finite Element (FE) models, on the other hand, are accurate enough but pose high computational cost. In this work, different marine vessel structures have been analysed using the well-known Carrera Unified Formulation (CUF). According to CUF, the governing equations (and consequently the finite element arrays) are written in terms of fundamental nuclei that do not depend on the problem characteristics and the approximation order. Thus, refined models can be developed in an automatic manner. In the present work, a particular class of 1D CUF models that was initially devised for the analysis of aircraft structures has been employed for the analysis of marine structures. This class, which was called Component-Wise (CW), allows one to model complex 3D features, such as inclined hull walls, floors and girders in the form of components. Realistic ship geometries were used to demonstrate the efficacy of the CUF approach. With the same level of accuracy achieved, 1D CUF beam elements require far less number of Degrees of Freedom (DoFs) compared to a 3D solid FE solution.