State of the Art
When developing a full-scale hull section for a large offshore vessel including the internal elements, entirely from composite materials, replacing the current steel solution, SOLAS conditions and ability to operate under harsh environments must be fulfilled. While the ‘building blocks’, such as materials, joints and joining techniques or solutions for equivalent fire safety are available from previous research and small-scale applications, solutions have never been combined, tested, validated and approved before. Production processes for large composite hull blocks are expensive and partly not suitable for practical use under shipyard conditions.
Objective
Acquire the capability to design, produce and market complete composite vessels approx. 85 m length that complies with SOLAS and class regulations. By validated the production process of large composite structures with economic and cost improvement, key performance indicator on fire resistance, impact resistance and structural robustness.
Solution
The aim is to design a complete composite vessel fulfilling SOLAS requirements and class rules, to develop production processes and quality assurance measures and to produce a full-scale hull section (ca. 6m x 6m x 3m). Besides designing and approving composite structures complying with class rules, challenges in scaling up the composites technology include pioneering the capability to infuse thick laminates up to 6 meters in height that represent full ship hull structures.
In the project the infusion of hull sections has been demonstrated with a technology of traditional sandwich structures and oblique layers structure. A novel resin has been developed focusing on the best balance between flow characteristics at different infusion temperatures and mechanical properties such as toughness. A real-life destructive test performed on site under supervision of testing experts, class and flag states focused on integration of processes and components as well as on understanding and demonstrating real-life behaviour. The test demonstrated the ability to successfully model, analyse and test large composite structures.
The demo will result in the first approved fibre-reinforced plastic (FRP) SOLAS ship.
Potential
A dramatic increase of shipyards’ trust, owners, flag states and class societies in the feasibility of composite solutions for large commercial ships is expected. Demonstration of a new approach leads to approval for future cases. Detailed knowledge on processes, design and testing is highly relevant for large load carrying composite structures in various applications, as well as in other sectors.