Assessment of a ship's performance in accidents

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art research on collision and grounding. It focuses on the three issues that a standard for design against accidents needs to address: definition of accident scenarios, evaluation approaches, and acceptance criteria. Accident scenarios may be created through surveys of historical data, consulting experts' opinions, or performing risk analysis. Structural crashworthiness of ships, oil outflow performance, and residual strength of damaged ships can be estimated using simple formulae, simplified analytical methods, or non-linear FEM techniques of different complexity. Performance of a ship in an accident can be measured by energy dissipation, penetration depth, quantity of oil outflow or residual hull girder strength. Acceptance criteria should be established on extensive comparative studies, and provide a means for balancing numerous variables in order to achieve an optimal solution. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.