Hydroelastic analysis of insulation containment of LNG carrier by global-local approach

The insulation containment of liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers is a large-sized elastic structure made of various metallic and composite materials of complex structural composition to protect the heat invasion and to sustain the hydrodynamic pressure. The goal of the present paper is to present a global-local numerical approach to effectively and accurately compute the local hydroelastic response of a local containment region of interest. The global sloshing flow and hydrodynamic pressure fields of interior LNG are computed by assuming the flexible containment as a rigid container. On the other hand, the local hydroelastic response of the insulation containment is obtained by solving only the local hydroelastic model in which the complex and flexible insulation structure is fully considered and the global analysis results are used as the initial and boundary conditions. The interior incompressible inviscid LNG flow is solved by the first-order Euler finite Volume method, whereas the structural dynamic deformation is solved by the explicit finite element method. The LNG flow and the containment deformation are coupled by the Euler-Lagrange coupling scheme. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.