Comparative Structural Requirements for High Speed Naval Craft: The ‘ROURKE Class’ Corvette

摘要

Following on from a paper presented at ‘Pacific-IMC-2015’ on various concepts for an 'Offshore Combatant Vessel’, this paper reviews different structural requirements for High Speed Naval Craft (or Fast Displacement Ships), using a 90 metre monohull Corvette as a representative example. It follows the theme of a Report published in 2005 by the U.S. Ship Structures Committee, SSC-439 ‘Comparative Structural Requirements for High Speed Crafts’, and a paper by the same title published by authors Stone and Novak, that advocated the use of an example to provide a meaningful quantitative comparison.rnThe work includes an independent review of Commonwealth Defence publication: DEF(AUST)5000 Volume 03 Part 01, Issue 01, 'Surface Ship Structure', 2007. An objective is to incorporate lessons-learned from the engineering analysis of Defence/Navy maritime projects that have experienced structural issues; including vibration and/or cracking, due to a combination of factors such as slamming and hull-whipping, corrosion and/or fatigue. The work considers a variety of methods for the assurance, verification, certification, and acceptance of navy surface ship structural reliability, and also assesses some practical operational limits and constraints, using predictive methods for wind-&-wave forecasting.