Fire Integrity in Advanced Ship Structures

A fully coupled fire simulation and thermal-mechanical response and damage prediction tool will be developed by enhancing, packaging, and integrating our existing solution modules as an add-on tool kit for a commercial finite element solver such as ABAQUS. This tool will for the first time be able to model the fluid-structure coupled response of an advanced ship structure to a fire environment and synergistic interaction of multiple failure modes and their compounding effects that contribute to the final catastrophic failure. GEM has secured commitments for technical support from Virginia Tech and the State University of New York at Buffalo, who will provide supporting data, solution modules, and expertise. The multi-faceted feasibility study consists of: 1) performance of a trade-off study between the commercially available FDS tool and our fully-coupled CFD tool for a 2D structural system; 2) enhancement of the current material characterization module by including creep and creep rupture behavior; 3) characterization of damage initiation and failure progression via a hybrid damage model; 4) implementation of these solution modules in ABAQUS via its user-defined subroutines; and 5) demonstration of the solution efficiency and accuracy based on available coupon and component test data.