Structural Design

Why are ship structures so labor intensive to design?  Just slap together some beams.  Complication:  for every single beam and plate, engineers need to anticipate multiple methods of failure.  DMS engineers need to protect against every failure mode, for each stiffener and plate on the ship.  The trick for efficient structural analysis focuses on recognizing which methods of failure are likely in each scenario.

DMS employs a combination of automated lofting process, class society calculations, and automated first principle calculations to not only optimize the structure, but also optimize our labor.  This allows us to deliver more detail with less effort.  A lighter structure with more definition, making it easier to build.  Services include:

  1. Structural lofting
  2. Class society calculations
  3. Finite element analysis (FEA)

In the course of our structural design, we can check any range of failure modes.  Examples include:

  1. Local bending
  2. Global bending
  3. Buckling
  4. Shear
  5. Fatigue
  6. Corrosion
  7. Combined stresses

Don’t let this happen to you!

MOL Comfort showing global structural failure.  

Image Credit:  The Commonwealth of the Bahamas, “Report of the Investigation Into the Sinking of the “MOL Comfort” in the Indian Ocean,” Bahamas Maritime Authority, London, UK, September, 2015.

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