Fatigue behaviour of toe and root stiffener cracks in stiffener-to-deck plate weld of orthotropic bridge decks

Fatigue cracks in the stiffener-to-deck plate connections of orthotropic bridge decks, initiating from the weld toe or root and propagating into the stiffener or weld throat, are experimentally and numerically studied. A statistical analysis of the structural stress is carried out using the experimental data. Automatic welded specimens show a...

Uncertainty quantification of the failure assessment diagram for flawed steel components in BS 7910:2019

The failure assessment line (FAL) describes the interaction between plastic failure and fracture of flawed steel components subjected to tension or bending. This paper quantifies the model uncertainty of the FAL as provided in the internationally used British Standard BS 7910:2019 by comparing the assessment with the actual failure load of 82...

BEM–FEM coupling for the analysis of flexible propellers in non-uniform flows and validation with full-scale measurements

The first part of the paper presents a partitioned fluid–structure interaction (FSI) coupling for the non-uniform flow hydro-elastic analysis of highly flexible propellers in cavitating and non-cavitating conditions. The chosen fluid model is a potential flow solved with a boundary element method (BEM). The structural sub-problem has been...

Hydro-elastic analysis of flexible marine propellers

Higher efficiencies, higher cavitation inception speeds and reduced acoustic signature are claimed benefits of flexible composite propellers. Analysing the hydrodynamic performance of these flexible propellers, implies that a coupled fluid-structure interaction (FSI) computation has to be performed. An FSI coupling can be monolithic, which means...

A new approach for computing the steady state fluid–structure interaction response of periodic problems

A special type of fluid–structure interaction (FSI) problems are problems with periodic boundary conditions like in turbomachinery. The steady state FSI response of these problems is usually calculated with similar techniques as used for transient FSI analyses. This means that, when the fluid and structure problem are not simultaneously...

Boundary element modelling aspects for the hydro-elastic analysis of flexible marine propellers

Boundary element methods (BEM) have been used for propeller hydrodynamic calculations since the 1990s. More recently, these methods are being used in combination with finite element methods (FEM) in order to calculate flexible propeller fluid–structure interaction (FSI) response. The main advantage of using BEM for flexible propeller FSI...

Support Structure Optimization: On the use of load estimations for time efficient optimization of monopile support structures of offshore wind turbines

Over the years, the installed capacity of offshore wind turbines is increasing rapidly. However, the Levelized Costs Of Energy (LCOE) is still higher than the LCOE of traditional energy production methods like nuclear power or energy from coals or gas. This research focuses on a further decrease of the LCOE, by minimizing the mass of a monopile...

Safety assessment of existing highway bridges and viaducts

The assessment of the structural safety of existing br idges and viaducts becomes increasingly important in many countries owing to an increase in traffic loads. Most existing standards, however, are developed for the design of new structures. For this reason, an assessment method for determining the actual safety level of highway bridges and...