VMA - Structural Analysis of Ships

To develop good products, design engineers need to study how their designs will behave in real-world conditions. Physical prototyping is an expensive, time-consuming way to do this, and the usual alternative - traditional numerical analysis - depends on highly trained specialists to get accurate results. Fortunately, there's a way to simulate the performance of your designs that doesn't have these drawbacks.

FEA is an analytical method used by engineers to help determine how well structural designs survive in actual conditions such as stress, vibration, heat, and other forces. FEA operates on the premise that a complex structure can be divided into smaller elements to form a finite element model simulating the structure's physical properties. The model is subjected to rigorous mathematical analysis. The results of the analysis, can then be reviewed by the user in a variety of, formats. FEA significantly reduces the time and, costs associated with prototyping and physical testing.They are effective tools for design engineers to solve any kind of structural problems for every purpose such as statics, dynamics, buckling, electromagnetics, fluid dynamics etc. Good engineering background is required to use them effectively. FEA is valuable tool for any area of a marine vehicle design specially for analyzing of composites and/or unusual hull forms, engine room ventilation optimizations, silent propeller designs, electromagnetic performance analysis of mine warfare vessels and submarines, collision simulations, fatigue simulations of hull structures and much more...

Structural analyzing of ships need special algorithms to work faster and more effective. For example modeling of the boundary conditions are very different of a ship than a steel building. The objective of the procedure is to determine the response of the ship's structure to applied static and dynamic loads and to verify the structural response against acceptance criteria for stress, deflection and buckling. Structural integrity is of paramount importance during the service life of a ship. Therefore several structural analysis software are developed by the leading ship classification societies. These software are using finite element analysis technology and generally targets to design large steel vessels.

General purpose finite element codes can deal with static and dynamic beam analyses for linear and non-linear conditions very well. But if you work only for beam structures these types of software can do nearly the same job with lower cost and shorter learning time. They are also easier to use.

It's harder to deal with composite structures due to the mechanical characteristics of the materials. For a good optimization between strenght-stiffness-weight and cost the computer technology required because this optimization problem is too complex. Leading FEA suites can also work with composites very effectively but if you need simpler to use and lower cost software there is also some good alternatives.

Some of the leading FEA suites have also very effective motion analysis modules. On the other hand there are stand alone softwares for dynamic and kinematic simulations of mechanical structures.

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last update at 23-May-2007