ABSTRACT

Scaled experiments are important in the crashworthiness analysis of marine structures since real-scale tests are difficult and expensive to be carried out. However, scaled tests in marine structures considered up to a maximum scale reduction of ten times, still resulting in large-size marine structures tests. In this work, three ship accident scenarios were experimentally modeled in 1:100 reduced scale: frontal collision of an oil tanker with bulbous bow against a rigid structure, ship grounding event caused by a sharp rock and the collision between two identical ships. In general, the resulting kinematic responses and collapse modes observed in the tested marine structures shows a good agreement with that observed in real-scale structures. Additionally, resulting average forces from the 1:100 scaled experiments showed to be within the same order of magnitude with that obtained from real-scale empirical approaches and large-scale experiments after bringing them all to actual-scale by similarity laws.