Analysis of a ship structure with finite element method

Besides the progress in the ship building industry, the demand to the ship structural analysis have been raising. In this master thesis 80 meters container trade ship?s modal frequency and stress analysis was performed by using MSC.Nastran code. Special purpose of this ship was to carry very long metallic profiles. To achieve this purpose the ship was to have very long storage area. It was very difficult to provide suitable stress values with just two bulkheads along the whole ship. On the other hand stress values must be suitable limits in the bending area.3D surface CAD model designed in SolidWorks according to firstly prepared DWG files. All extend, trim and split operations are performed in tools of SolidWorks software. Similar components are divided into sub assemblies and imported in MSC.Sofy mesher software for generation of surface mesh. After all sub assemblies are meshed these assemblies were merged and mesh quality improved. This mesh grid had imported into MSC.Patran and load - boundary conditions applied. Model file send to MSC.Nastran for modal frequency analysis and structural stress analysis for two loading cases.Finally, all discussions were performed and for the critical stress areas some improvements and modifications are advised in this thesis.Keywords: FEM, ship structural analysis, natural frequency, stress analysis