A Methodology for Survivability Analysis
A ship-to-ship collision may not always be possible to avoid, but there are ways of reducing the damage. Per Hogström research focuses on how ships are damaged in a collision, contributing to an increased safety for the environment at sea, people onboard and the cargo.
Per Hogström put forward his doctoral thesis on 2 March. During five years of research, he has been looking at how the side shell of a ship can be designed to better withstand a collision. Different concepts are compared and evaluated, like for example the so called X-core structure that is already being used in new-buildings. This is compared with a side shell with a corrugated inner watertight barrier that unfolds in the case of collision – a new, innovative concept proposed by Chalmers researchers. The latter has the potential of increasing the crashworthiness significantly. Based on this work, ship owners can get help with building more crashworthy vessels.
When Per Hogström put forward his licentiate thesis in 2010, he had been working in a project connecting two computational models together. The focus was on how damages on ships from collisions depend on, for example, the speed of the colliding ship and the angle between the ships. These results were then used in stability simulations to determine the survival time of the ship after a collision. He has continued working with how different uncertainty parameters in the structural strength computation affect the survival time of the ship. Much focus has been on how to represent the behavior of the material of the ships in the computer models.