ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the ultimate strength of hull girders and the attention has been particularly paid on large container ships hogging bending. The ultimate strength of the hull girder of container ships has also become a design assessment parameter to be carefully assessed before the construction of the ships. In the simplified approaches for assessing the ultimate strength of hull girders, an appropriate distribution of longitudinal stresses in the ship’s hull cross-section at the state of overall hull girder collapse is firstly assumed. There are a number of proposals on the assumption of the longitudinal stress distribution over the ship’s hull cross section at the ultimate limit state. Some investigations have been carried out for hull girder collapse using non-linear finite element analysis, but it is a time consuming task. Full-scale tests on ultimate capacity of hull girders are rare because of both the technical difficulty and economic costs.
