A Study on Dynamic Response of Flat Stiffened Plates to Slamming Loads Considering Fluid-Structure Interaction

The slamming phenomenon commonly exists in many practical engineering areas. When slamming occurs, structures are likely subjected to slamming load characterized by high pressure within a short time duration. This load can cause damages to structures. In this study, slamming loads on flat stiffened aluminum plates of high-speed vessels and its dynamic response are investigated numerically. The numerical method is validated against the relevant experimental data from the open literature. The explicit finite element with Multi-Material Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian solver is adopted to simulate the slamming impact of flat stiffened plates. Bilinear strain hardening with no strain-rate hardening was considered for the numerical simulation of the aluminum plate models. The effect of the heat-affected zone (HAZ) on the response of flat stiffened aluminum plate is also numerically evaluated and found to be considerable. The effect of structural flexibility, impact velocity, and air cushion are investigated through parametric studies. The results showed that the impact pressure and deflection of the flat stiffened aluminum plate increased with the impact velocity, while higher rigidity of the plate resulted in a less deflection and higher pressure as well as shorter impact pressure duration. In addition, the air cushion effect was found to be significant which reduced peak impact pressure, deflection of the aluminum plate model and lengthened the impact pressure duration. The discussion of predicted results of slamming pressure and deflection of the stiffened plate model are presented in detail.