Still water vertical loads during transient flooding of a tanker in full load condition with a probabilistic damage distribution

The study of the transient still water vertical loads progression, throughout the flooding process, is presented for a damaged shuttle tanker in full load condition. The vessel is damaged by box-shaped volumes following the probabilistic distribution models of their extent and position suggested by the Marine Environment Protection Committee of the International Maritime Organization (IMO). A subset of this model is considered, by taking into account only the collision cases where the centre of the damage is about the waterline. Discretization of the problem is implemented with 90 damage configurations and the flooding progression is simulated by a quasi-static version of a generalized adaptive mesh pressure integration technique code for progressive flooding of floating objects. The vertical loads are determined at each time step, which provides initial, minimum, maximum and final values of bending moment and shear force, evaluated along the length of the ship, for the total simulation time. The probability and magnitude of higher intermediate loads and the main effects of the damage parameters and the factor interactions between these are determined and analysed, with and without introducing the IMO probabilistic distribution.