An experimental investigation of the performance of metallic and sandwich ship bulkheads under combined thermo-mechanical loading

Despite the well know advantages of composite materials that have consolidated their implementation in a variety of industrial applica-tions, very few non-military applications exist in the marine industry. In fact, the majority of marine structures is almost exclusively de-signed and manufactured using metallic materials despite the fact that these lead to heavy designs, and they are susceptible to corrosion and fatigue. The reason why composites have not been implemented in commercial shipping is because until 2002, when the so-called regulation 17 was introduced, SOLAS regulations did not allow the use of combustible materials onboard ships [1]. Nevertheless this rule has proven hard to implement as the evaluation and acceptance of designs encompassing composite materials has proven cumber-some. Moreover, the existing set of regulations were introduced at a time when metallic materials were the sole option and as such they do not explicitly address issues related to the performance of com-posite materials but rather try to enforce the same operational criteria that exist for metallic structures to their composite counterparts. The scope of this work is to compare the performance of three different structural bulkhead designs, located at the superstructure of a pas-senger ship, under combined thermal and mechanical loading fol-lowing the prescribed FTP code standards [2]