Buckling and Ultimate Strength Assessments of Ship Structures

This paper presents buckling and ultimate strength assessment methods for ship structures. Buckling and collapsing analysis approaches for plates, stiffened panels and hull girders are described and their development history and employments in ship design assessments are reviewed and discussed. Examples using non-linear finite (FE) element analysis are given and comparisons between results obtained by formulae and FE analysis are carried out. Lloyd’s Register’s recent research and development work on ultimate strength and its applications to existing oil tankers and bulk carriers are also presented.