21/05/2026
🚢 Studying a Ship Collision with Simulation
Crash simulations aren’t just for cars. In the marine industry, they offer crucial insights into how ship structures behave under extreme impact.
Here’s a fascinating example from Karlsson & Co.* – the simulation of a mock-up structure representing the bulb impact in the case of two ships colliding.
In this case, the bulb (the hemispherical impactor) hits and pe*****tes the side hull of another ship, modeled as a stiffened shell structure.
The upper-left graph shows the reaction force over displacement, while the color contours visualize plastic strain across the hull – revealing how the material deforms and absorbs energy.
⚙️ How It Works
The main ingredients required to study your product’s crash behavior:
⚓ Explicit dynamic FEM simulation
⚓ Material modeling– plasticity, damage initiation, and evolution
⚓ Contact modeling
⚓ Rigid body behavior
In this simulation, our Simulation Manager Kilwa used Abaqus/Explicit, modeling the material response with:
🔹 Linear elasticity
🔹 Plasticity with isotropic hardening
🔹 Ductile damage initiation criterion (where the plastic strain at damage onset depends on stress triaxiality)
🔹 Damage evolution with linear softening
Once the elements reached total damage, they were removed from the mesh — allowing the bulb to pe*****te through the shell just like in a real collision.
💡 Why It Matters
Such simulations help engineers predict and prevent catastrophic failures, optimize structures, and enhance safety — long before any physical testing happens.
Reference:
Karlsson U, Ringsberg JW, Johnson E, Hosseini M, Ulfvarson U. Experimental and numerical investigation of bulb impact with a ship side-shell structure. Marine Technology 2009; 46(1):16–26.
