The current paper deals with the safety of fishing vessels, which needs more speculations than other ship types. The characteristics of accidents of fishing vessels are rather different compared with other commercial vessels. In the context, the methodology of the formal safety assessment, one of the important issues in the maritime world to enhance the safety of marine vehicles, are reviewed and consulted along with other methodologies to see its applicability for fishing vessels. It is anticipated that further effective measures for better safety of fishing vessels can be identified including due considerations of the aspect of human elements, i.e. cultural environment.

A numerical method is developed for computing the free surface flows around a transom stern of a ship at a high Froude number. At high speed, the flow may be detached from the flat transom stern. In the limit of the high Froude number, the problem becomes a planning problem. In the present study, we make the finite-element computations for a transom stern flows around a wedge-shaped floating ship. The numerical method is based on the Hamilton's principle. The problem is formulated as an initial value problem with nonlinear free surface conditions. In the numerical procedures, the domain was discretized into a set of finite elements and the numerical quadrature was used for the functional equation. The time integrations of the nonlinear free surface condition are made iteratively at each time step. A set of large algebraic equations is solved by GMRES(Generalized Minimal RESidual, Saad and Schultz 1986) method which is proven very efficient. The computed results are compared with previous numerical results obtained by others.

Sound reception system is required to detect the sound and the quadrantal direction of the other ship's horn sound, to overcome the effects of enclosed wall for navigation space, functioning as a sound barrier. However, the realized systems can only provide quadrantal information of the other ship. This paper presents a new arrangement of microphones, having geometrically symmetric deployment with the same distances between sensors and the same angles between adjacent sensors with respect to the geometrical center. The sound pressures received at microphones are transformed into the related envelope signals by applying Hilbert transform. The time delays between microphones are estimated by the correlation functions between the derived envelope signals. This envelope base processing mitigates the noises related to the reflection by ship and sea surface. Then, the directional information is easily defined by using the estimated time delays. The suggested method is verified by the generated signals using boundary element method for a small ship model with sea surface wave. The estimated direction is quite similar to the true one and therefore the proposed approach can be used as an efficient sound reception system.

A vessel/mooring/riser coupled dynamic analysis program in time domain is developed for the global motion simulation of a turret-moored, tanker based FPSO designed for 6000-ft water depth. The vessel global motions and mooring tension are simulated for the non-parallel wind-wave-current 100-year hurricane condition in the Gulf of Mexico. The wind and current forces and moments are estimated from the OCIMF empirical data base for the given loading condition. The numerical results are compared with the OTRC(Offshore Technology Research Center: Model Basin for Offshore Platforms in Texas A&M University) 1:60 model-testing results with truncated mooring system. The system's stiffness and line tension as well as natural periods and damping obtained from the OTRC measurement are checked through numerically simulated static-offset and free-decay tests. The global vessel motion simulations in the hurricane condition were conducted by varying lateral and longitudinal hull drag coefficients, different mooring and riser set up, and wind-exposed areas to better understand the sensitivity of the FPSO responses against empirical parameters. It is particularly stressed that the dynamic mooring tension can be greatly underestimated when truncated mooring system is used.

Welding deformations injure the beauty of appearance of a structure, decrease its buckling strength and prevent increase of productivity. Welding deformations of real structures are complicated and the accurate prediction of welding deformations has been a difficult problem. This study proposes a method to predict the welding deformations of large structures accurately and practically based on the simplified thermal elasto-plastic analysis method. The proposed method combines the inherent strain theory with the numerical or theoretical analysis method and the experimental results. The weld joint is assumed to be divided into 3 regions such as inherent strain region, material softening region and base metal region. Characteristic material properties are used in structural modeling and analysis for reasonable simplification. Calculated results by this method show good agreement with the experimental results. It was proven that this method gives an accurate and efficient solution for the problem of welding deformation calculation of large structures.

In this paper, a continuum-based design sensitivity analysis (DSA) method is developed for the weakly coupled thermo-elasticity problems. The temperature and displacement fields are described in a common domain. Boundary value problems such as an equilibrium equation and a heat conduction equation in steady state are considered. The direct differentiation method of continuum-based DSA is employed to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of sensitivity computation. We derive design sensitivity expressions with respect to thermal conductivity in heat conduction problem and Young's modulus in equilibrium equation. The sensitivities are evaluated using the finite element method. The obtained analytical sensitivities are compared with the finite differencing to yield very accurate results. Extensive developments of this method are useful and applicable for the optimal design problems incorporating welding and thermal deformation problems.