RELIABILITY OF MAINTAINED SHIP HULLS SUBJECTED TO CORROSION

A time-variant formulation is presented to model the degrading effect that corrosion has on the reliability of ship hulls. The effect of cor rosion is represented as a time dependent decrease of plate thickness that affects the midship section modulus. One repair policy was consid ered and the example results showed the effect of plate replacement wh en its thickness reached 75% of the original thickness. The example re sults also illustrated how the limit value of the thickness in the rep air criteria influences the reliability and the decision about repair actions. This is also shown for the effect of different corrosion rate s and allowable stresses.