Scaling characteristics of hull girder's ultimate strength and failure behaviors: An empirically modified scaling criterion

Scale models are normally designed as alternatives to true ship structures in ultimate strength experiments. In this paper, a series of true ship hull girders of a 10,000 TEU container ship under different scale combinations of geometric length and plate thickness are modeled and analyzed to investigate the scaling characteristics of hull girders' ultimate strength and collapse behaviors, aiming at developing a more precise scaling criterion of the ultimate strength between scale model and true ship. In addition, the reliability and applicability of the proposed scaling criterion has been validated by a series of simplified ship hull girder models, of which the numerical results have been validated by scale model experiments. Results show that, under different scale combinations of geometric length and plate thickness, the first order scaling law which is derived based on dimension analysis has significant errors in quantifying the converting process of the ultimate strength between scale model and true ship. Correspondingly, an empirically modified scaling criterion is proposed in this paper to improve the accuracy of the converting process of the ultimate strength between scale model and true ship.