The new guidelines from Bureau Veritas for ULCS

The French classification society Bureau Veritas has issued new guidelines for the design of 10,000 TEU + ships

The new guidelines from Bureau Veritas (BV) are aimed at yards designing ultra large container vessels (ULCS) – defined somewhat broadly as ships of 10,000 TEU capacity and above.

Specific attention is paid to whipping and springing, two dynamic phenomena that increase in importance as the ship size increases. A number of studies performed for ULCS show that they cause amplification of the hull girder bending stresses, as well as a measurable contribution to the accumulation of fatigue damage in structural details.

For a typical ULCS, with a length of over 360m, speed of about 25 knots, and large open deck structure, whipping and springing have to be considered at the design stage. Whipping effects can cause an increase of about 20% in the total vertical bending moment and an increase in short-term fatigue damage accumulation by a factor of up to 100% for some head sea conditions.

The increase in effect on the long-term, whipping induced, fatigue damage accumulation has been found to be in the order of 3- 5% for whipping and 4-10% for springing.

BV says that its new guidelines provide a comprehensive methodology to perform this assessment at the design stage, which will help shipyards to build safe and reliable container ships.

Source:
http://www.worldcargonews.com

Tags: Bureau Veritas, BV, ULCS

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Cargo & Shipping News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.