Safety management in marine engineering to be supported by computational mechanics

摘要

The safety management in marine engineering has long been supported with the help of skilled workers. Meanwhile, the lack of such skilled workers is of growing problem in marine engineering field and related areas. Incidentally, Computational Mechanics has attained remarkable progress in this decade, and it is expected to be effective means to solve the problem stated above. In this paper, the tightening procedure of pipe flange connection is adopted, as an example of its engineering application. The most critical problem concerned is the estimation of scatter in bolt preloads, when tightening bolts one by one. Such complicated problem could now be analyzed by FEM. In addition, a numerical method offering an optimal tightening procedure is presented here, which estimates how much initial bolt preload is needed for each bolt to achieve uniform bolt preloads in the final state. The numerical method proposed here is expected to partly compensate the lack of skilled workers and contribute the safety management in marine engineering.