ABSTRACT
Ship hulls are exposed to millions of stress cycles over their lifetime. These stress cycles may lead to the formation of fatigue cracks. Tools are available to assess fatigue in the (early) design stage. The tools and input to these tools are inherently associated with uncertainties. One way to mitigate these uncertainties and associated risks is to make measurements as the ship is in service with a hull structure monitoring system. This paper presents a summary of two HSM programs. The first to verify the SFA design approach and the second a longer term monitoring to quantify the lifetime effect of fatigue uncertainties associated with ship operational conditions.
