Abstract
The potential pollution problems resulting from tanker collision necessitate the requirement for an effective structural design and the development of relevant safety regulations. During a few decades, the great effort has been made by the international Maritime Organization and the Administration, etc, to reduce oil spillage from collision accidents. However there is still a need for investigation in the light of structural evaluation method for the experiments and rational analysis, and design development for an operational purpose of ships. This study aims for investigating a complicated structural response of bow structures of simplified models and oil carriers for assessing the energy dissipation and crushing mechanics of the striking vessels through a methodology of the numerical analysis for the various models and its design changes. Through these study an optimal bow construction absorbing great portion of kinetic energy at the least penetration depth prior to reach to the cargo area and an effective location of collision bulkhead are investigated. In order to obtain a rational results in this study, three stages of collision simulation procedures have been performed step by step as follows; 1) 16 simplified ship models are used to investigate the structural response against bow collision with variation of primary and secondary members. Mass and speed are also varied in four conditions. 2) 21 models consisted of 5 sizes of the full scaled oil carriers are used to perform the collision simulation with the various sizes and deadweight delivered in a recent which are complied with SOLAS and MARPOL. 3) 36 models of 100l oil carrier are used to investigate the structural response and its influence to the collision bulkhead against bow collision in variation with location of collision bulkhead, primary members, framing system and colliding conditions, etc. By the first study using simplified models the response of the bow collision is synthetically evaluated for the parameters influencing to the absorbed energy, penetration depth and impact force, etc.