In this project, novel microstructure-dependent beam and plate models and finite elements are proposed for steel sandwich panels. Such panels have applications especially in ship building. The all-steel panels can offer weight and material savings in cruise ships because of advantageous weight-to-stiffness ratios. The decreased structural weight enables higher payloads and further renders to better fuel-efficiency, not to mention the space-savings due to the compactness of a sandwich panel in comparison to a stiffened plate.
It depends largely on Europe’s ability to stay ahead in research, development and innovation for the current shipbuilding jobs to stay in Europe by developing new solutions like the ones in this project. After all, European shipyards and maritime equipment manufacturers (propulsion, automation, etc.) employ more than half a million people directly and nearly as much indirectly, working at around 300 shipyards and 22,000 supplying companies. Europeans have long been outperformed by their Japanese, South Korean and Chinese rivals in orders for large, standardised ships such as oil tankers and bulk carriers. Nonetheless, the European shipyards still have the strongest footing in advanced shipbuilding including high-value-added products like cruise ships, icebreakers and research vessels, each of which is typically a one-of-a-kind showpiece of engineering. Ultimately, the simple but accurate beam and plate models developed in this project will enable 20–30% more weight-efficient structural designs and will speed-up a simulation-based design process at least 50% mainly by scrapping computationally costly 3-D finite element models. In a cruise ship, weight savings of such magnitude make it possible to add another cabin deck to the ship. The developed structural models can also be used to model beams and plates made of architected lattice materials which are gaining popularity with the rise of additive manufacturing (3-D printing) technologies.
