FULL-SCALE COLLISION TESTS

The Association for Structural Improvement of Shipbuilding Industry (ASIS) and the Netherlands Foundation for the Coordination of Maritime Research (CMO) jointly conducted a series of collision tests on full-scale ships in December 1991. Four different tests were carried out using two fully instrumented tankers for inland waterway navigation. The results of the test will be used to verify calculation methods for the prediction of damage to ship structures from collisions or from groundings. In order to be able to make a proper judgement of possible ship structures and thus enable improvement of safety levels of marine operations, it is important that such methods are available. Although prediction methods are available, no full-scale experiments have been carried out before, for verification. In the project the four full-scale collisions have been simulated afterwards using the MSC/DYNA program, a nonlinear finite element program, which enables the full simulation of the dynamics of the impact event. The results of this simulation compare quite well to actual measurements.