Centre for Advanced Composite Materials
Dynamic behaviour of composite structures subject to water slamming
Slamming, the impact between a marine craft's hull and the water surface is a critical load case for structural design of marine vessels.
The importance of hull slamming has led to a significant body of work to understand, predict and model these impacts. There is however, a lack of experimental data for validation, particularly for deformable panels and sandwich structures. This project focuses on the generation of comprehensive and reliable experimental data on slamming impacts for both rigid and flexible panel structures, allowing for the characterisation of flexible body impacts as well as enabling validation of analytical, semi-empirical and numerical predictions.
Research areas
This research covers a number of smaller projects, each developing and validating particular areas of focus for the project, such as:
Experimental testing of flexible body impacts
- Effect of structural rigidity.
- Variation of rigid body impact.
- Comparison to predictions by design methods.
Numerical simulation of impact events
- Full 2D dynamic modelling using Combined Eulerian Lagrangian formulations.
- Simplified 2D and 3D static and quasi-static finite element modelling.
Dynamic characterisation of constituent materials
- PVC, SAN and PET foam core characterisation.
