Assessment of Ultimate Longitudinal Strength of a VLCC considering Kinematic Displacement Theory

Abstract

This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.This paper presents prediction of ultimate longitudinal strength of a VLCC, "Energy Concentration" for which many benchmark studies have been carried out, based on kinematic displacement method proposed by Tayyar and Bayraktarkatal (2012). Kinematic displacement theory provides semi-analytical solution of average compressive strengths for various kinds of stiffened panels. The accuracy of average compressive strengths obtained from formulas of CSR(common structural rules) for tankers and kinematic displacement method are discussed in the fore part of this paper. Hull girder ultimate strengths using Smith method are also compared for different average compressive strengths. By comparing them with other benchmark results, it is concluded that the new method provides lower bounds, because hull girder strengths under the sagging and hogging moment conditions approach nearly lower bounds.