Fire Integrity in Advanced Ship Structures (MSC P7002)

One critical concern in using advanced materials, such as composite materials and aluminum, in navy ship structures is their structural reliability under fire. Under a previous Navy program, Materials Sciences Corporation (MSC) developed a novel and sophisticated analysis system for the assessment of composite structures under fire. The opportunity under this SBIR program is to bring this system to maturity, and to verify its accuracy and applicability to the fire performance analysis of Navy ships. The package will combine: 1) state-of-the-art material models to predict material degradation of advanced materials under elevated temperatures, including material softening and material pyrolysis, as well as yielding affects of aluminum under fire, 2) established theories, such as classical lamination theory and anisotropic plate theory, to predict overall global behavior of composites for known loading situations, and 3) innovative methods to predict the behavior complex composite parts (i.e., composite joints).This SBIR program will allow MSC to turn a fire-analysis software module into a complete, stand-alone package that may be used by engineers for the rapid assessment of advanced structures under fire conditions.