Graduation Assignment Slamming

MSc thesis research:
How does the ship structure vibrate globally and locally when slamming?

There is an opportunity for graduation work at the MT&T department of the TU Delft.

Project background
Vessels traveling at high forward speed often experience exit of their bow from the water and re-entry, the so-called bow slamming. Slamming can often result in high peak pressures in that region, which can in turn cause vibrations of the hull structure.
Vibrations of the hull can be divided into two categories:
 Global responses of the hull girder, which in this case are called “whipping”, and resemble transient responses of a beam.
 Local responses of the stiffened panels around the area of impact.
The energy transferred to the hull is distributed into these two categories, but the exact proportion is uncertain. This is because modelling the physics of slamming computationally is extremely complicated, and most physical models used in experiments cannot capture both global and local responses concurrently.

Tasks
You will work together with supervisors at TU Delft M&TT and in MARIN. You will create a physical model of a ship hull using additive manufacturing and investigate the transient vibratory responses under slamming loads in the towing tank. Some key tasks that you will perform in this thesis include:
 You will design a globally and locally scaled model of a ship hull.
 You will produce the model out of polymer using additive manufacturing.
 You will plan and install instrumentation capable of capturing the desired responses.
 You will identify the modal properties of your hull and compare them to numerical predictions.
 You test your hull in the towing tank, at a range of forward speeds and wave conditions, and measure the transient responses due to slamming.

Details
Student with a (maritime) structures engineering or towing tank testing background is recommended.

Contact
Apostolos Grammatikopoulos (a.grammatikopoulos@tudelft.nl)