Development of Evaluation System for Fatigue Strength on the Connection Between Longitudinals and Transverse Web

Abstract

Ship structure is composed of the welded mixture members which are plate and stiffeners. Ship structure is also influenced by variable loadings such as wave and inertia load. There have been several fatigue damage problems on the connection between longitudinal and transverse web due to wide usage of high tensile steel and adoption of wide web space to improve shipbuilding productivity. It is impossible to estimate the fatigue lives for all connection details through refined fatigue analysis. It is necessary to use the simplified approach for the fatigue life estimation of the connection details. PLUS analysis, which is suggested by the classification society, is one of the simplified approaches and is widely adopted to get fatigue lives for the connection details along whole cargo hold area.However, ship building yards still have difficulties to get fatigue lives due to large amount of calculation and time even if this approach reduce the time and amount of calculation. This paper treats the computing system developed to reduce efforts of estimating the fatigue lives. The influence factors of mean shear stress and local dynamic pressure are easily calculated and fatigue lives for all hot spots can be estimated automatically by the developed computing system. It is possible to reduce computing time and efforts to get the fatigue lives for the connection details between longitudinals and transverse webs along the ship. This system was applied to get fatigue lives on the connection details of a VLCC and verified the availability.