Assessment of survivability of surface combatants after damage in the sea environment

The operating conditions of modern warships, in the natural sea environment, have a significant influence on their survivability in the event that watertight integrity is lost. Up to now, the consideration of sea and weather conditions has been implicitly accounted for in a naval ship’s damaged stability assessment. This paper outlines a probabilistic approach to assessing a naval ship’s damage stability, in which some of the limitations of the currently used damage stability criteria are identified, including the validity of the assumption of moderate sea states at the time of damage. An investigation into the operability of a frigate design found that there is a significant increase in the risk of a ship’s loss when changing the operational area from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific. A remarkable additional finding of the study showed that the assumed distribution for the damage penetration has no significant effect on the ship’s survivability due to the way modern combatants are designed.