Abstract A new structural concept for the Floating Production Storage and Offload System (FPSO) hulls is being developed to enable cleaning and inspections of cargo tanks with remote equipment without people needing to enter the tanks. Parts of the cargo tank structures are built with Steel-Concrete-Steel (SCS) sandwich panels to minimize obstacles for the cleaning and inspection robots. On the other hand, the rest of the hull structure is made of traditional naval structures composed of stiffened steel plates, aiming to minimize the weight and cost of the hull. Initial aspects of this development were presented at OMAE2024. The SCS sandwich plate system (SPS) comprises a lightweight concrete core (LWC), two external steel plates, and shear studs. The constitutive models for the steel plates and shear studs are assumed to be linear elastic, while the concrete is represented using a non-linear model. The interaction between these components is modeled as bonded contact, a hypothesis validated through experimental results. The loadings from the global to the local analyses are transferred via the compatibility of displacements, rotations, and internal forces between the global and local models. This work presents numerical local studies of the connection between the traditional stiffened steel plates and the SPS at the longitudinal bulkhead and transverse reinforcement in the FPSO sandwich hull design. The stress level and total damage in the steel and concrete remain in the linear elastic region for each load combination. The numerical results for the supported SPS beam agree with experimental data, supporting the defined hypothesis and ensuring accurate stress and damage responses for the local analyses.
Zuniga et al. (Sun,) studied this question.
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