Abstract

Fatigue is one of the most significant failure modes for marine structures such as ships and offshore platforms. Among numerous methods for fatigue life estimation, spectral method is considered as the most reliable one due to its ability to cater different sea states as well as their probabilities of occurrence. However, spectral based simulation procedure itself is quite complex and numerically intensive owing to various critical technical details. Present research study is focused on the application and automation of spectral based fatigue analysis procedure for ship structure using ANSYS software with 3D liner sea keeping code AQWA. Ansys Parametric Design Language (APDL) macros are created and subsequently implemented to automate the workflow of simulation process by reducing the time spent on non-value added repetitive activity. A MATLAB program based on direct calculation procedure of spectral fatigue is developed to calculate total fatigue damage. The automation procedure is employed to predict the fatigue life of a ship structural detail using wave scatter data of North Atlantic and Worldwide trade. The current work will provide a system for efficient implementation of stochastic spectral fatigue analysis procedure for ship structures.

Keywords:

Ansys, automation, hot spot, spectral fatigue, stochastic, stress response,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.