Simulation-based fatigue crack management of ship structural details applied to longitudinal and transverse connections

It is of continuing importance for ship structural design to establish a system to compute the growth behavior of fatigue cracks propagating in structural details. In the present paper, a simulation program is developed for multiple fatigue cracks propagating in a three-dimensional stiffened panel structure, where it can predict fatigue crack lives and paths by taking into account the interaction of multiple cracks, load shedding during crack propagation and welding residual stress. Various fatigue crack propagations in longitudinal stiffeners of ship structures are investigated by both the present simulation method and experiments. From these results, it is found that the crack propagation may considerably change, depending on the loading conditions, structural details and residual stress distributions. This means that one could possibly manage to avoid fatal damage of the skin-plate by properly designing the structural details. Furthermore, these results may imply a possibility to realize a rational fatigue crack management if one can estimate the fatigue crack-propagation behavior during the ship lifecycle. The present simulation program may offer a useful numerical tool for this purpose.