Advanced damage stability assessment for surface combatants

One of the major contributors to the survivability of a surface combatant is her reduced vulnerability to weapon effects and as such the ship׳s damage stability characteristics determine a ship׳s ability to resist the consequences of possible flooding, namely to not capsize and/or sink. There are serious concerns about the limitations of the current semi-empirical deterministic criteria in which a combatant׳s damage stability is assessed upon. This paper details a comparison between the current approach and a newly presented probabilistic approach with the aim of determining which will result in a more accurate way of estimating the level of survivability of a particular design. A study is also presented in which the maximum damage length used in the naval ship assessment is increased to merchant ship standards of 0.24Lbp.