Jo Mar 19, 2025

The deck, bottom, side shell, bulkhead structures and superstructures consist of stiffened panels and grillages, which serve as the most important components in ship structures. The ship grillage structure consisting of several girders crossing each other and a plate is a complex structural system. In a structural system consisting of several structural components with several possible failure modes, system failure generally occurs as a complex combination of failure modes.

However, as the stiffeners and transverse girders are related to each other in the ship grillage structure which consists of several stiffeners, transverse girders and plates, it is incorrect that the grillage will fail if any of the stiffeners or transverse girders fail. Therefore, the system reliability of the ship grillage should be estimated by taking account of all possible failure modes and paths of the stiffeners and transverse girders. In addition, if some stiffeners fail, the remaining (unbroken) stiffeners will be subjected to the external load, which leads to the stress redistribution for them.

Ri Yong Ho, an institute head at the Faculty of Shipbuilding and Ocean Engineering, has proposed a method for estimating the system reliability of ship grillage under combined axial compression and lateral pressure load, and estimated the structural system reliability on the buckling collapse of the bottom structure of an oil tanker.

First, he modeled the grillage into a structural system consisting of several longitudinal stiffeners and transverse girders with attached plating in parallel, respectively, and considered how the external load is distributed and transferred to the longitudinal stiffeners and transverse girders. On this basis, he estimated the reliability of each stiffener on the buckling collapse. Then, he performed an analysis of the system reliability of the ship grillage, considering the stress redistribution in the remaining unbroken stiffeners after any one of the stiffeners failed.

The results of the comparison with the literature show that the proposed method can more realistically and accurately evaluate the reliability of the structural system.

You can find the details in his paper “A method for estimating the system reliability of ship grillage structure” in “Marine Systems & Ocean Technology” (SCI).