Ship Structural Analysis & Design
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this graduate and advanced undergraduate course from the Department of Ocean Engineering (now part of Mechanical Engineering), covering the structural design of ships and offshore structures. Lessons build from hydrostatic loading, shear load, and bending moment through primary hull stresses, the effect of superstructures and dissimilar materials, transverse shear, and torsional strength. Failure mechanisms and design limit states are developed for plate bending, column and panel buckling, panel ultimate strength, and plastic analysis, alongside an introduction to matrix stiffness, grillage, and finite element methods. Students work through hand calculations and desktop computer tools before completing a final design project using structural design software for a ship section. Materials include the full syllabus, lecture notes, assignments, and project descriptions, requiring a prior background in structural mechanics. No certificate is offered, consistent with MIT OpenCourseWare's open publication model.