Strength of ships

The strength of ships is a topic of key interest to naval

architects and shipbuilders. Ships which are built too
strong are heavy, slow, and cost extra money to build
and operate since they weigh more, whilst ships which
are built too weakly suffer from minor hull damage and
in some extreme cases catastrophic failure and sinking.

1 Loads on ship hulls

The hulls of ships are subjected to a number of loads.
Diagram of ship hull (1) Sagging and (2) Hogging under loads.
Bending is exaggerated for illustration purposes.
• Even when sitting at dockside or at anchor, the
pressure of surrounding water displaced by the ship
presses in on its hull. 2. up in the center, known as hogging.

• The weight of the hull, and of cargo and components This can be due to:
within the ship bears down on the hull.

• Wind blows against the hull, and waves run into it. • hull, machinery, and cargo loads

• When a ship moves, there is additional hull drag, the • wave loads, with the worst cases of:
force of propellors, water driven up against the bow. • sagging, due to a wave with length equal to the
• When a ship is loaded with cargo, it may have many ship’s length, and peaks at the bow and stern
times its own empty weight of cargo pushing down and a trough amidships
on the structure. • hogging, due to a wave with length equal to
the ship’s length, and a peak amidships (right
If the ship’s structure, equipment, and cargo are dis- at the middle of the length)
tributed unevenly there may be large point loads into the
structure, and if they are distributed differently from the Primary hull bending loads are generally highest near the
distribution of buoyancy from displaced water then there middle of the ship, and usually very minor past halfway
are bending forces on the hull. to the bow or stern.

When ships are drydocked, and when they are being built, Primary strength calculations generally consider the mid-
they are supported on regularly spaced posts on their bot- ships cross section of the ship. These calculations treat
toms. the whole ships structure as a single beam, using the
simplified Euler-Bernoulli beam equation to calculate the
strength of the beam in longitudinal bending. The mo-
1.1 Primary hull loads, strength, and ment of inertia (technically, second moment of area) of
bending the hull section is calculated by finding the neutral or cen-
tral axis of the beam and then totaling up the quantity
bh3 2
The primary strength, loads, and bending of a ship’s hull Iy = 12 + Ad for each section of plate or girder mak-
are the loads that affect the whole hull, viewed from front ing up the hull, with Iy being the moment of inertia of
to back and top to bottom. Though this could be con- that section of material, b being the width (horizontal di-
sidered to include overall transverse loads (from side to mension) of the section, h being the height of the section
side within the ship), generally it is applied to longitudi- (vertical dimension), A being the area of the section and
nal loads (from end to end) only. The hull, viewed as a d being the vertical distance of the center of that section
single beam, can bend from the neutral axis.
Primary strength loads calculations usually total up the
1. down in the center, known as sagging ships weight and buoyancy along the hull, dividing the

1
2 1 LOADS ON SHIP HULLS

1.2 Secondary hull loads, strength, and

bending

The secondary hull loads, bending, and strength are those

loads that happen to the skin structure of the ship (sides,
bottom, deck) between major lengthwise subdivisions or
bulkheads. For these loads, we are interested in how this
shorter section behaves as an integrated beam, under the
local forces of displaced water pushing back on the hull,
cargo and hull and machinery weights, etc. Unlike pri-
mary loads, secondary loads are treated as applying to a
complex composite panel, supported at the sides, rather
than as a simple beam.
Secondary loads, strength, and bending are calculated
similarly to primary loads: you determine the point and
distributed loads due to displacement and weight, and de-
termine local total forces on each unit area of the panel.
Those loads then cause the composite panel to deform,
usually bending inwards between bulkheads as most loads
are compressive and directed inwards. Stress in the struc-
ture is calculated from the loads and bending.

1.3 Tertiary hull loads, strength, and

Primary (1), Secondary (2), and Tertiary (3) structural analysis bending
of a ship hull. Depicted internal components include a watertight
bulkhead (4) at the primary and secondary level, the ship’s hull
Tertiary strength and loads are the forces, strength, and
bottom structure including keel, keelsons, and transverse frames
bending response of individual sections of hull plate be-
between two bulkheads (5) at the secondary level, and transverse
tween stiffeners, and the behaviour of individual stiffener
frames (6), longitudinal stiffeners (7), and the hull plating (8) at
the tertiary level. sections. Usually the tertiary loading is simpler to calcu-
late: for most sections, there is a simple, maximum hy-
drostatic load or hydrostatic plus slamming load to calcu-
late. The plate is supported against those loads at its edges
by stiffeners and beams. The deflection of the plate (or
stiffener), and additional stresses, are simply calculated
hull into manageable lengthwise sections such as one from those loads and the theory of plates and shells.
compartment, arbitrary ten foot segments, or some such
manageable subdivision. For each loading condition,
1.3.1 Ship hull structure elements
the displaced water weight or buoyancy is calculated for
that hull section based on the displaced volume of water
within that hull section. The weight of the hull is similarly
calculated for that length, and the weight of equipment
and systems. Cargo weight is then added in to that sec-
tion depending on the loading conditions being checked.
The total still water bending moment is then calculated
by integrating the difference between buoyancy and total
weight along the length of the ship.
For a ship in motion, additional bending moment is added
to that value to account for waves it may encounter. Stan-
dard formulas for wave height and length are used, which
take ship size into account. The worst possible waves are,
as noted above, where either a wave crest or trough is lo-
cated exactly amidships. Structural Elements of a Ship’s Hull
Those total bending loads, including still water bending
moment and wave loads, are the forces that the overall This diagram shows the key structural elements of a ship’s
hull primary beam has to be capable of withstanding. main hull (excluding the bow, stern, and deckhouse).
 3

1. Deck plating (a.k.a. Main Deck, Weatherdeck or many ships are at sea during cold storms in wintertime,
Strength Deck) and some older ship steels which were not tough enough
at low temperature caused ships to crack in half and sink
2. Transverse bulkhead during World War II in the Atlantic.
3. Inner bottom shell plating The benchmark steel grade is ABS A, specified by the
American Bureau of Shipping. This steel has a yield
4. Hull bottom shell plating
strength of at least 34,000 psi (230 MPa), ultimate ten-
5. Transverse frame (1 of 2) sile strength of 58,000 to 71,000 psi (400 to 490 MPa),
must elongate at least 19% in an 8-inch (200 mm) long
6. Keel frame specimen before fracturing and 22% in a 2-inch (50 mm)
long specimen.
7. Keelson (longitudinal girder) (1 of 4)
A safety factor above the yield strength has to be applied,
8. Longitudinal stiffener (1 of 18) since steel regularly pushed to its yield strength will suffer
9. Hull side beam from metal fatigue. Steels typically have a fatigue limit,
below which any quantity of stress load cycles will not
cause metal fatigue and cracks/failures. Ship design cri-
The depicted hull is a sample small double bottom (but
teria generally assume that all normal loads on the ship,
not double hull) oil tanker.
times a moderate safety factor, should be below the fa-
tigue limit for the steel used in their construction. It is
1.4 Total loads, bending, and strength wise to assume that the ship will regularly operate fully
loaded, in heavy weather and strong waves, and that it will
The total load on a particular section of a ship’s hull is encounter its maximum normal design operating condi-
the sum total of all primary, secondary, and tertiary loads tions many times over its lifetime.
imposed on it from all factors. The typical test case for Designing underneath the fatigue limit coincidentally and
quick calculations is the middle of a hull bottom plate beneficially gives large (factor of up to 6 or more) total
section between stiffeners, close to or at the midsection safety factors from normal maximum operating loads to
of the ship, somewhere midways between the keel and ultimate tensile failure of the structure. But those large
the side of the ship. ultimate safety margins are not the intent: the intent is
that the basic operational stress and strain on the ship,
throughout its intended service life, should not cause se-
2 Standard rules rious fatigue cracks in the structure. Very few ships ever
see ultimate load conditions anywhere near their gross
Ship classification societies such as Det Norske Veri- failure limits. It is likely that, without fatigue concerns,
tas, American Bureau of Shipping, and Lloyd’s Regis- ship strength requirements would be somewhat lower.
ter have established standard calculation forms for hull See Strength of materials.
loads, strength requirements, the thickness of hull plating
and reinforcing stiffeners, girders, and other structures.
These methods often give a quick and dirty way to esti- 4 Numerical modeling
mate strength requirements for any given ship. Almost
always those methods will give conservative, or stronger
While it is possible to develop fairly accurate analyses of
than precisely required, strength values. However, they
ship loads and responses by hand, or using minimal com-
provide a detailed starting point for analyzing a given
puter help such as spreadsheets, modern CAD computer
ship’s structure and whether it meets industry common
programs are usually used today to generate much more
standards or not.
detailed and powerful computer models of the structure.
Finite element analysis tools are used to measure the be-
haviour in detail as loads are applied. These programs
3 Material response can handle much more complex bending and point load
calculations than human engineers are able to do in rea-
Modern ships are, almost without exception, built of steel. sonable amounts of time.
Generally this is fairly standard steel with yield strength However, it is still important to be able to manually calcu-
of around 32,000 to 36,000 psi (220 to 250 MPa), and late rough behaviour of ship hulls. Engineers do not trust
tensile strength or ultimate tensile strength (UTS) over the output of computer programs without some general
50,000 psi (340 MPa). reality checking that the results are within the expected
Shipbuilders today use steels which have good corro- order of magnitude. And preliminary designs may be
sion resistance when exposed to seawater, and which do started before enough information on a structure is avail-
not get brittle at low temperatures (below freezing) since able to perform a computer analysis.
4 7 REFERENCES

5 See also
• Naval architecture

• Shipbuilding
• Bulkhead (partition)

• Double bottom

• Shell plating
• Beam

• Strength of materials

6 External links
• Ship Structure Committee

7 References
• Benford, H., Naval Architecture for Non-Naval Ar-
chitects, 1991, ISBN 0-939773-08-2

• Jensen, J.J., Load and Global Response of Ships,

2001, ISBN 0-08-043953-5
• Lewis ed., Principles of Naval Architecture: Volume
I - Stability and Strength, 1989, ISBN 0-939773-00-
7

• Timoshenko, S., Theory of Plates and Shells, 1959,

ISBN 0-07-064779-8

• Tupper, E., Introduction to Naval Architecture, 1996,

ISBN 0-939773-21-X

• S.E. Hirdaris, W. Bai, D. Dessi, A. Ergin, X. Gu,

O.A. Hermundstad, R. Huijsmans, K. Iijima, U.D.
Nielsen, J. Parunov, N. Fonseca, A. Papanikolaou,
K. Argyriadis, A. Incecik, Loads for use in the de-
sign of ships and offshore structures, Ocean En-
gineering, Volume 78, 1 March 2014, Pages 131-
174, ISSN 0029-8018, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.
oceaneng.2013.09.012.
 5

8 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

8.1 Text
• Strength of ships Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strength%20of%20ships?oldid=605718621 Contributors: CesarB, Circeus, Cm-
drjameson, Andrew Gray, Gene Nygaard, Fosnez, Georgewilliamherbert, SmackBot, Commander Keane bot, Hmains, Bluebot, Arend
van Voorthuysen, RomanSpa, BoH, Cydebot, Underpants, Jmvolc, Saintrain, R'n'B, Zephyrus67, Andromedahpg, Addbot, Tupsumato,
Allanbc, ChrisGualtieri, The Anonymouse, S hirdar and Anonymous: 9

8.2 Images
• File:ShipHullStructure.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b3/ShipHullStructure.png License: CC-BY-SA-2.5
Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
• File:ShipHullStructureElements.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0b/ShipHullStructureElements.png License:
CC-BY-SA-2.5 Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
• File:ShipSaggingHogging.png Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/ShipSaggingHogging.png License: CC-
BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: Own work Original artist: George William Herbert
• File:Text_document_with_red_question_mark.svg Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Text_document_
with_red_question_mark.svg License: Public domain Contributors: Created by bdesham with Inkscape; based upon Text-x-generic.svg
from the Tango project. Original artist: Benjamin D. Esham (bdesham)

8.3 Content license

• Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0