Damage prediction in ships and offshore structures Damage prediction in ships and offshore structures Marine structures can experience damages although they are initially designed with high safety factors. These damages can be caused by many reasons such as collisions, groundings, explosions, corrosion, fatigue, overloading or extreme conditions. For addressing the nucleation and growth of damages especially for multiple crack paths, classical continuum mechanics (CCM) faces conceptual and mathematical challenges since equations of CCM involve spatial derivatives of displacement components. In contrast, by replacing the partial differential equations of CCM with integro-differential equations, peridynamics (PD) work well with both continuous and discontinuous models. Therefore, it can capture damages in a natural way even with multiple cracks. Fig. 1. Damage in anoffshore structure: left: due to wave loading; right: due to ship collision. The purpose of this PhD study is to develop numerical methods to predict and simulate damage process in ships and offshore structures in a realistic way. As part of the ongoing thesis, novel PD models for beam and shell structures are developed by PhD student Cong Tien Nguyen and Dr. Selda Oterkus. They also demonstrated the capability of their PD beam model by predicting damages for an offshore structure. As a next step, they are using ARCHIE-WeST facilities to predict damages in ship structures by using their developed PD models. For more information contact: Dr Selda Oterkus (selda.oterkus@strath.ac.uk), Senior Lecturer at the Department of Naval Architecture Marine & Ocean Engineering at the University of Strathclyde . For a list of the research areas in which ARCHIE-WeSt users are active please click here.