Probabilistic Vulnerability Assessment Tool for Surface Ship under Extreme Dynamic Loads

While probabilistic methods have been applied extensively to quantify uncertainty of sea environments and estimate reliability of naval vessels under normal seaway loads, their extension to surface ships subjected to extreme dynamic loads due to collision, grounding, and weapon effects has not been well explored. Under these extreme loads, the structural response behaves nonlinearly. In addition, the complexity of fluid-structure interaction phenomena may render the assumptions on the loading process (stationary and Gaussian) invalid. In this study, we develop probabilistic analysis tools to assess the response uncertainty and variance in vulnerability assessment due to known variability in materials properties, geometric configuration, failure criteria, and loading parameters.