Reliability of maintained ship hulls subjected to corrosion and fatigue under combined loading

摘要

A formulation is presented for the assessment of the reliability of longitudinal members of a ship hull as a result of fatigue and corrosion under combined loading. The model allows for the existence of multiple cracks and it accounts for the crack growth process. The time dependent degrading effect of corrosion and crack growth on the midship section modulus are modelled as random processes. The reliability is predicted by a time variant formulation and, using a two-failure criterion, the effects of maintenance actions in increasing the reliability are shown. The sensitivity of the reliability estimates with respect to different loading combi- nations is also studied. The formulation has been applied to a tanker.