Loading of the Hull Girder

Abstract

Current progress in ship structure analysis is extremely rapid. Until the middle of the 1950's, all computations of external longitudinal stresses in ships were done using the quasistatic method which is discussed in section 1.3. In 1953, St. Denis and Pierson published a work in the Transactions of SNAME under the title: "On the Motions of Ships in Confused Seas." This work came to represent the introduction to a new era on the subject, since following its publication statistical methods were introduced in the mathematical description of ships' motion and the resulting loading when operating in a storm sea. This method of approach has proved very useful. Even though we most likely are still in the early stages of development of a rational set of dimensioning rules based on statistical methods, it must be characterized as fortunate that these new methods were introduced in time to be of value in establishing strength requirements for the very large ships built today.