Experimental and numerical study on ultimate bearing capacity of pressure cabin for nuclear power ships

Abstract With the continuous development of nuclear power application, the structural design and verification of pressure-resistant cabin has become the key technology for nuclear-powered ships or nuclear-powered icebreakers. Through the design of reinforced pressure-resistant structure, the ultimate strength of the pressure-resistant cabin was investigated by experimental analysis and nonlinear finite element analysis. Moreover, the load-displacement curve of the cabin structure and the progressive failure mode were obtained through the numerical analysis of the full-scale model. Based on the similarity criterion, the corresponding scale models were designed and tested. Compared with the numerical results of the scale model, it is found that the failure mode in the tests are consistent with that in the numerical analysis. For the cabin structure of nuclear-powered ship, especially the prismatic pressure vessel, the corner is the key location for stress concentration. In order to comprehensively improve the bearing capacity and weight reduction of the cabin structure, the diagonally stiffened optimization model is proposed and further verified numerically.