Structural integrity monitoring index for ship and offshore structures

Recent years have seen enormous activity in the development of Structural Integrity Monitoring/Structural Health Monitoring equipment and systems for Ship and Offshore Structures. Systems based on technology that could in the past have only been used under laboratory conditions are now frequently deployed offshore very often claiming accuracy and reliability commensurate with laboratory measurements. Monitoring is certainly an exciting prospect and has many advantages over traditional NDT; there are however, some very fundamental issues that must be resolved to benefit fully from these new technologies. Not least of these is the development of objective measures to quantitatively assess the performance characteristics of monitoring technologies. This paper presents the background and development of such a measure of performance based on a fatigue failure model for Ships and Offshore Structures. This new measure, the Structural Integrity Monitoring Index or SIMDex can be similarly applied using any failure model and criterion and means that Structural Integrity Monitoring technologies can be objectively judged solely on their suitability for specific applications.