Ship Structures and Materials

A ship is not a rigid object. It is a hollow steel girder, flexing continuously in waves, carrying loads that shift with every sea state, every cargo configuration, and every weapons effect. Most engineers who work on ships learn this late, if at all. This course builds that structural intuition from the ground up — starting with how to model a ship as a beam, construct shear force and bending moment diagrams, and trace how primary loads drive the decisions that shape a hull's architecture. From there, the course moves through the materials and structural systems that actually resist those loads. You will learn the difference between transverse and longitudinal framing and why that choice matters more than the amount of steel you use. You will learn why HY-80 steel exists, why the Navy shifted toward HSLA grades, and what the Falklands War taught designers about aluminum topside structures. These are not historical footnotes — they are the lessons that got built into current design practice. The final third of the course covers what happens after the ship is built. Fatigue, corrosion, and shock loading are not failure modes to worry about at launch; they are the slow, cumulative forces that determine whether a structure survives 30 years of hard use. By the end, you will be able to calculate bending stress in a midship section, read a finite element analysis output critically, and understand how structural decisions made at the design stage ripple through a warship's entire service life.