Timothée Pire

Optimisation of Ship and Offshore Structures and Effective Waterway Infrastructures to Support the Global Economic Growth of a Country/Region

This paper includes the following parts:• Ship Structure Optimization: methodology to perform ship scantling optimization, decreasing steel weight and keeping the production cost at an acceptable level. We first review the links between “Design” and “Optimization” and secondly define the place of “Ship Structure Optimization” within the general framework of a “Ship Optimization”.• Ship impacts (Collision), with applications to navigation lock and dry dock gates: these gates have to be designed taking into account accidental loads, such as ship collisions. A new simplified analytical method is proposed, based on the so-called super-element method. This method was developed to rapidly assess the crashworthiness of the collided structure and avoid high computational effort of numerical simulations.• Inland waterway Navigation and the development in South America of Inland Waterway Classifications.• EMSHIP, European ERASMUS MUNDUS education program (www.emship.eu): the unique master’s degree in Ship & Offshore Structures awarded by the prestigious European Erasmus Mundus Program. EMSHIP shares the outstanding experiences of educators, trainers, industrial partners and students in the rapidly developing areas of marine and offshore engineering industry.

On the Ultimate Compressive Strength of Transversely Cracked Plates

This paper aims to numerically analyse the ultimate strength of transversely cracked steel plates under longitudinal compressive loading, considering the effect of initial distortion as well. The main objective of this study is to investigate the ultimate compressive strength characteristics of an unstiffened steel plate due to transverse cracking damages located in the middle (i.e. centre cracks and edge cracks). To achieve that, a series of non-linear finite element (FE) analyses are carried out using ANSYS commercial finite element code. The obtained FE results are discussed to indicate the amount of crack influence, in terms of its length and location, on the ultimate compressive strength of a steel plate element with different thicknesses.Copyright