| Abstract | Structural design has been shown to be an effective tool for reducing collision damage and cargo spill of a struck oil tanker given a collision. This paper explores the structural redesign of a double-hull oil tanker side-shell in order to improve its collision performance with respect to hull rupture, damaged area, and oil-outflow. In particular, the side-shell plate stiffening arrangement and transverse web frames are redesigned, with weight and structural capacity as design constraints. Explicit-dynamics numerical models using LS-DYNA show that reducing the structural rigidity of the tanker's side-shell, while maintaining the same plate stiffening steel weight may: increase the efficiency of the side-shell in converting kinetic collision energy into elastic strain energy; reduce the longitudinal and overall damaged areas; and 'compartmentalize' the damage so that residual stresses decrease quickly with radial distance from the point of impact. |
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