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The purpose of the development of KC-1 LNG cargo containment system is reduction in royalty and increase in competitiveness of shipbuilding industry. An assessment of structure safety for LNG cargo containment system under sloshing load due to ship motion has become an important design element. The ideal way is to implement fully interaction of the fluid domain and the cargo containment system. However the irreg-ular sloshing pressure were idealized in the form of a triangular wave for safety assessment because the flu-id-structure interaction analysis is taken the extensive computation time and difficult to ensure the accuracy of the results. In this study, the sloshing load was assumed to be a triangular wave with a maximum pressure of 10 bar during 15/1000 seconds. In the analytic results, the basic insulation panel of KC-1 LNG cargo contain-ment system was assessed to be structurally safe for sloshing load.Key words : KC-1 LNG cargo containment system, insulation panel, sloshing, structure safety

This paper describes the structural analysis and optimization of stiffeners used in inner tanks for liquid natural gas (LNG) storage, so that the costs can be minimized while the critical buckling load of the inner tank still exceeds the external pressure exerted by the perlite. The original calculation of perlite pressure applied to the inner tank was based on Zick's code, which led to the overestimation of the external pressure, and consequently, an oversized stiffener. In this study, the effects of the material properties of perlite on the external pressure distribution are scrutinized, and the optimum dimensions of a single stiffener are finally obtained through a series of parametric studies. A 15% decrease in the cost of the stiffener compared with the original design is achieved.

Many tests are required to predict the fatigue life of composite laminates made of various materials and having different layup sequences. Aiming at reducing the number of tests, a methodology was presented in this paper to predict fatigue life of composite laminates based on fatigue life prediction of constituents, i.e. the fiber, matrix and interface, using micromechanics of failure. For matrix, the equivalent stress model which is generally used for isotropic materials was employed to take care of multi-axial fatigue loading. For fiber, a maximum stress model considering only stress along fiber direction was used. The critical plane model was introduced for the interface of the fiber and matrix, but fatigue life prediction was ignored for the interface since the interface fatigue strength was presumed high enough. The modified Goodman equation was utilized to take into account the mean stress effect. To check the validity of the theory, the fatigue life of three different GFRP laminates, UDT[], BX[]S and TX[]S was examined experimentally. The comparison between predictions and test measurements showed good agreement.

A micromechanics-based constituent progressive damage model was proposed in this study to predict macroscopic failure behavior of composite laminates under multi-axial mechanical loadings as well as thermal influences. For this purpose, a micromechanics-based failure theory, named the micromechanics of failure, has been further developed not only to account for the constituent failure but also to progress damage. We first modeled the unit cell of the microstructure of a UD lamina both to derive ply properties from constituent properties and to calculate micro stresses within fiber and matrix from macro-level ply stresses using stress amplification factors. Independent failure criteria dedicated to each constituent are employed to judge failure modes of fiber, matrix, and fiber-matrix interface. Good agreement between theoretical predictions and test data was achieved.

A multi-scale fatigue life prediction methodology of composite pressure vessels subjected to multi-axial loading has been proposed in this paper. The multi-scale approach starts from the constituents, fiber, matrix and interface, leading to predict behavior of ply, laminates and eventually the composite structures. The life prediction methodology is composed of two steps: macro stress analysis and micro mechanics of failure based on fatigue analysis. In the macro stress analysis, multiaxial fatigue loading acting at laminate is determined from finite element analysis (FEM) of composite pressure vessel, and ply stresses are computed using a classical laminate theory (CLT). The micro-scale stresses are calculated in each constituent (i.e. matrix, interface, and fiber) from ply stresses using a micromechanical model. Micromechanics of failure (MMF) was originally developed to predict the strength of composites and now extended to prediction of fatigue life. Two methods are employed in predicting fatigue life of each constituent, i.e. an equivalent stress method for multi-axially loaded matrix, and a critical plane method for the interface. A modified Goodman diagram is used to take into account the generic mean stresses. Damages from each loading cycle are accumulated using Miner’s rule. Each fiber is assumed to follow a probabilistic failure depending on the length. Using the overall micro and macro models established in this study, Monte Carlo simulation has been performed to predict the overall fatigue life of a composite pressure vessel considering statistical distribution of material properties of each constituent and manufacturing winding helical angle.