An Efficient Direct Calculation Approach for Fatigue Assessment of Container Ships Concerning Bending and Warping Stresses

Container ships are particularly susceptible to torsional loads. The distribution of torsion-induced warping stress in a container ship hull is more complicated and difficult to be expressed by beam theory formulas. In practice, finite element (FE) analysis is typically used to calculate the stress response to wave-loading conditions. However, it is time consuming to compute hull girder stresses for all relevant sea conditions through FE analyses. In this paper, an efficient and robust approach is proposed by combining beam theory and FE analyses in the determination of hull girder stresses. The parameters required by beam theory can be regressed through matching stress records from a FE analysis with the corresponding sectional and pressure loads from the hydrodynamic simulation. Stress records obtained using the proposed method are utilized in fatigue assessment of a case study container vessel. The results show that the accuracy of the regression approach is satisfactory compared with the full FE analyses.