Page 366 - Practical Design Ships and Floating Structures

Practical Design of Ships and Other Floating Structures 34 I
You-Sheng Wu, Wei-Cheng Cui and Guc-Jun Zhou (Eds)
0 200 1 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

A STUDY ON AN INFORMATION SYSTEM OF
DAMAGES OF SHIP STRUCTURES

Y. Kawamura', T. Seki', T. Sakuragi' and Y. Sumi'
' Department of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering, Yokohama National University,
79-5 Tokiwadai Hodogaya-ku Yokohama 240-8501, Japan
' Formerly Graduate Students of Yokohama National University

ABSTRACT

Subcritical damages such as fatigue cracks and corrosion do not immediately cause a loss of
serviceability or serious disaster such as oil spill from tankers. However, the maintenance of ship
structures is very important to avoid such casualties. In this paper, a new concept of an information
system of damages of ship structures is proposed in order to improve the safety and to support the
maintenance of ships in service. In the proposed system, all information of damages in a certain ship is
managed in one database, and appropriate action could be taken based on the assessment of these
damages. In order to construct the database, object oriented data model of crack and corrosion damages
with the structuraI data model of a single-hull tanker is developed. The prototype system is constructed
on an object oriented database on an engineering workstation. For the efficient use of such system, the
inspection with high detectability of damages and a convenient recording of the damages to the
database are necessary. In this paper, a ship inspection supporting system by using a portable (wearable)
computer and virtual reality technique is also proposed. The validity of the proposed systems is
illustrated by some examples.

KEYWORDS
Information system, Damages of ship structures, Corrosion, Crack, Data model, Virtual reality,
Portable (wearable) computer

1 INTRODUCTION
Generally, subcritical damages such as fatigue cracks and corrosion occur in ship structures during the
service period. While such damages could cause a serious disaster, they may be comparatively light
ones when they are detected so that such disasters can be prevented by appropriate countermeasures.
For this purpose, it is necessary to grasp the state of the damages correctly and to evaluate them
appropriately.