Study on shell–solid coupling FE analysis for fatigue assessment of ship structure

A simple, robust and high-precision method for shell–solid coupling has been demonstrated. The coupling is achieved by a fictitious shell plane perpendicular to the original shell plane. The guidelines for this coupling technique for ship structural analysis are established by examining the local stress of the stool-like welded joint models. The surface stresses in the vicinity of the weld of a small corner joint model and a large ship structure model calculated by the proposed technique are in good agreement with those obtained from the multipoint constraint-based coupling models and the strain measurements. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed technique in the local approach fatigue assessment of actual ship structures.