Crashworthiness assessment of thin-walled double bottom tanker: Influences of seabed to structural damage and damage-energy formulae for grounding damage calculations

Abstract The results of the crashworthiness assessment under grounding scenarios are presented in the previous part of this two-part companion paper. This part presents results from numerical analyses with focus on structural performance accounting for seabed topology, and investigation of energy formulae for application in calculation of grounding damage. Study in this work is divided into three stages, i.e. finite element method (FEM) verification using laboratory experiment, numerical calculation of ship grounding using FEM, and comparison of the FEM results with empirical formulae of damage-energy calculation. Fundamental formula of Minorsky is considered with other improvement expression, such as Woisin and Zhang. Investigation suggested that the recent-developed expression produces the closest estimation to the verified FEM results. On the other hand, fundamental formulae of Minorsky is the farthest compared to the FEM, which indicates constant value in the expression needs to be more specific as improved in the Woisin formula.