ABSTRACT
In a mid-ship area of container ships, lateral loads due to water pressure are usually larger than cargo loads, and a double bottom is locally bended with an upward convex deformation between transverse watertight bulkheads. This chapter aims to clarify the progressive collapse behavior of a container ship under combined hogging bending moment and bottom local loads performing nonlinear Finite Element (FE) analyses. It also aims to develop an extended C. B. Smith’s method that can deal with the bottom local deformation. Comparing with the pure bending case, the collapse region shift towards the partial bulkhead where the longitudinal bending stress of the double bottom due to local loads is large. Smith’s method for the collapse analysis of a ship hull girder under pure bending is extended for the case of combined bending and bottom local loads by introducing the essential features of the Smith’s method to the conventional FE method.
