Sensitivity Analysis on Ultimate Hull Bending Moment and Multi-Criteria Comparative Analysis of Existing Method

The authors performed an assessment of the sensitivity of the “average strain-average stress curves (σ−e)” on the ultimate hull bending moment (Mu) and the moment-curvature relationship (Mu-φ). This assessment concerns the ultimate bending moments obtained through standard progressive collapse analysis (Smith Algorithm). As this analysis has shown that the main factor to assess the ultimate bending moment of a hull girder is the quality of the “σ-e” curves, the authors performed an extensive comparison on 18 different methods providing the ultimate compressive strength and the average “σ-e” relationship of longitudinally stiffened panels. Extended and updated results are available in this paper.