Abstract
This paper describes a study on the tearing damage of a ship's bottom plating, during a grounding. It is widely known that different scaling laws are applied for bodies undergoing simultaneous plastic flow and crack propagation in the deformation of plate tearing. Specifically, the basic scaling law is not followed for the fracture. In this study, in order to verify the problem, plate cutting experiments for geometrically similar models have been performed. From the experimental results, it has been observed that the cutting forces and energy for the larger models are significantly lower than those of the smaller models. A simplified analytical method for the estimation of tearing is proposed, based on the experiments. It has been observed that the results of the present formula are highly correlated with the experiments.