Owing to their excellent physical characteristics of lightweightiness, compactness and rapid deployment, the inflated membrane structures satisfy the demands of maritime salvage and military transportation for long-distance delivery and rapid response. Exploring the failure behaviour of inflated membrane structures can greatly contribute to their widespread applications in ocean engineering. In this research, the main objective is to comprehensively investigate the bending and failure behaviour of inflated membrane structures. Thus, the Surface-Based Fluid Cavity method is employed to set up the finite element model (FEM) which is compared to the experimental results to verify its reliability. In parallel, the effects of internal pressure and wrinkles are discussed. An empirical expression of the ultimate bending loading was fitted by face-centred composite designs of the Response Surface Methodology. The results of experiments and FEM show that the bearing capacity of the inflated membrane structure is positively correlated with the internal pressure but decreased obviously with the occurrence and propagation of wrinkles. The deformation behaviour and the stress distribution are similar to those of the traditional four-point bending beam, and the local instability induced by wrinkles will cause structural failure. In addition, the numerical model and the proposed expression showed deviations below 5% in relation to the experimental measures. Therefore, the FEM and proposed expression are high of reliability and have important engineering guiding significance for the application of inflated membrane structures in ocean engineering.

Membrane structures made of high-strength polyester fabrics are deployable and lightweight, which can be utilized in architecture, aerospace and marine structures. The design and optimization of an inflated structure depends on a thorough understanding of polyester fabric mechanics. In this work, firstly, the material properties of the polyester fabric membrane were analyzed by a tensile test. The bending and wrinkling behaviours of the inflated polyester fabric membrane were investigated by experimental, analytical and numerical methods. Specimens of varying internal pressures and diameters were subjected to bending tests with highly controlled loading and boundary conditions. It was found that the flexural capacity of the inflated membrane structure was positively correlated with the diameter and the internal pressure but decreased obviously with the occurrence and propagation of wrinkles. Based on the energy principle, the prediction formula of mid-span deflection was developed with the consideration of shear stiffness. Furthermore, the surface-based fluid cavity method was employed to set up a finite element model (FE model). The flexural behaviour of inflated membrane structure can be predicted by both the analytical and the numerical method, and the reliability was verified by comparing with the experiment

Ship hatch corner is a common structure in a ship and its fatigue problem has always been one of the focuses in ship engineering due to the long–term high–stress concentration state during the ship’s life. For investigating the fatigue life improvement of the ship hatch corner under different shot peening (SP) treatments, a series of fatigue tests, residual stress and surface topography measurements were conducted for SP specimens. Furthermore, the distributions of the surface residual stress are measured with varying numbers of cyclic loads, investigating the residual stress relaxation during cyclic loading. The results show that no matter which SP process parameters are used, the fatigue lives of the shot–peened ship hatch corner specimens are longer than those at unpeened specimens. The relaxation rate of the residual stress mainly depends on the maximum compressive residual stress (σ^RS_max) and the depth of the maximum compressive residual stress (δ_max). The larger the values of σ^RS_max and δ_max, the slower the relaxation rates of the residual stress field. The results imply that the effect of residual stress field and surface roughness should be considered comprehensively to improve the fatigue life of the ship hatch corner with SP treatment. The increase in peening intensity (PI) within a certain range can increase the depth of the compressive residual stress field (CRSF), so the fatigue performance of the ship hatch corner is improved. Once the PI exceeds a certain value, the surface damage caused by the increase in surface roughness will not be offset by the CRSF and the fatigue life cannot be improved optimally. This research provides an approach of fatigue performance enhancement for ship hatch corners in engineering application.

Addressing the challenges for detecting underwater damage to the structures with pile foundation, this study presents the design of an adsorption-operated robotic system. Initially, a prototype is proposed for an adsorption-operated robot that is equipped with an automatic movement mechanism. To account for the disturbance of the drag force in the control system, a hydrodynamic numerical model for the detection robot is established. The numerical results of the drag force are then integrated into the control system, leading to the design of a force-redeemed active disturbance rejection controller. Furthermore, a novel detection algorithm based on the image segmentation network UNet is developed for the automatic identification of damages. The performance of the controller and detection algorithm is evaluated against traditional methods. The results indicate that the proposed force-redeemed active disturbance rejection controller outperforms traditional PID and ADR controllers in terms of overshoot and adjustment time. Moreover, the developed detection algorithm exhibits superior performance in precision, F1 score, and mean intersection over union compared to the traditional algorithms of FCN, PSPnet, Deeplabv3, and UNet. Overall, this paper advances the technology of autonomous robots for underwater detection in the structures with pile foundation.

In order to investigate the effect of shot distance and impact sequence on the residual stress distribution of 42CrMo steel in shot peening (SP) finite element (FE) simulation, 3D dynamic models with order dimple pattern and stochastic dimple pattern were established via ABAQUS/Explicit 6.14, and the simulation results were compared with experiments. The results show that shot overlap has a significant effect on the residual stress distribution of peened parts. Meanwhile, there is a threshold (related to SP parameter) for shot distance in the vertical and horizontal directions. When the shot distance is greater than the threshold in this direction, the residual stress distribution after SP tends to be stable. The impact sequence has almost no effect on the impact of a small number of shots, but this effect will appear when the number of shots increases. It is necessary to avoid shot overlap and continuous impact of adjacent dimples when the FE model is established; on this basis, the distance between shots and the number of layers of the shots can be reduced as much as possible without affecting the residual stress distribution. In addition, the comparison of simulation and experimental results shows that the residual stress evaluation area consistent with the experimental measurement is essential to obtain accurate residual stress distribution in the FE simulation process.