Hydro - Structure Interactions
Technical Bulletin 2013

As a class society, Bureau Veritas has to evaluate the structural integrity of floating units. Therefore, alongside the developments of complex hydrodynamics tools, efficient coupling with the structural models also have to be developed, both in terms of tools and methodologies.

In this regard, a tremendous R&D effort has been spent these last years to be able to propose a robust and efficient numerical tool, able to deal with any practical hydro-structure interaction issue: although extreme and fatigue failure are fundamentally different, their overall assessment methodologies have many common points, and both can be assessed with BV’s HOMER software. Among the many specific issues related to hydro-structure coupling, HOMER is the leading software in the field of hydro-elastic structural responses of highly flexible structures (ultra large container ships for example): springing, which is the resonant elastic response of the ship subjected to wave loads, or whipping, which is the transient elastic response of the ship to slamming impact loads. An application example of the software can be found in one of the papers, where the authors assessed the influence of the springing response on the fatigue of a 18000TEU container vessel.

Another R&D field of importance is the measurements of hull girder loads, both during full-scale measurement campaigns and mode scale experiments; indeed these loads cannot be measured directly, and are assessed through the conversion of local structural response (strains). A review of the different existing methods is done, and applied to an instrumented ultra large container ship.

Finally, up-front research on semi-analytical solution of the second order hydro-elastic response is carried out in cooperation with Pusan National University. These analytical results are fundamental for validation of the numerical tools such as HOMER.

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