Methods for ultimate limit state assessment of ships and ship-shaped offshore structures: Part III hull girders

The present paper is Part III of a series of three papers on the methods useful for ultimate limit state assessment of ships and ship-shaped offshore structures. It is focused on the methods for the progressive collapse analysis of hull girders under bending moments, in contrast to the previous two papers (Parts I and II), respectively, dealing with methods for the ultimate limit state assessment of unstiffened plates and stiffened panels. An AFRAMAX-class hypothetical double hull oil tanker structure designed by IACS common structural rules (CSR) method is studied as an illustrative example. The ultimate vertical bending moment capacity of the hull structure is then analyzed by ANSYS FEA, ALPS/HULL, and IACS CSR methods, and their resulting computations are compared.