As a result of the wide use of high-tensile steel and the imperfect fabrication process in ship construction as well as some uncertainties in ship fatigue design, cracks could be initiated much earlier than expected. The presence of fatigue cracks greatly affects a ship's structural safety and serviceability. To ensure structural safety and perform reliable crack inspection and maintenance planning, it is important to know how fast cracks can grow in ship structures. In the current study, the principles of fracture mechanics are used for crackpropaga-tion analysis in ships. By taking into account the special properties of a ship's stress response, an efficient spectral method is proposed and validated for the prediction of crack propagation in ship structures.
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