Collision Risk Analysis for HSC

High Speed Craft (HSC) have a risk profile, which is distinctly different from conventional ferries. Due to different hull building material, structural layout, compartmentation and operation, both frequency and consequences of collision and grounding accidents must be expected to be different from conventional ships.

To reach a documented level of safety, it is therefore not possible directly to transfer experience with conventional ships. The purpose of this paper is to present new rational scientific tools to assess and quantify the collision risk associated with HSC transportation. The paper demonstrates how it is possible to use modern methods to calculate both the probability of collision impact and the resulting damage.It is generally agreed that the high speed has considerable influence on the probability of ship accidents in the form of collisions and grounding.

But so far no rational analysis tools to quantify the effect of the high speed have been available. Instead nearly all research on ship accidents has been devoted to analysis of the consequences of given accident scenarios. The proposed collision analysis includes an analysis which determines the probability of a collision for a HSC on a given route, an analysis of the released energy during a collision, analytical closed form solutions for the absorbed energy in the structure and finally an assessment of the overall structural crushing behaviour of the vessel, including the level of acceleration and the size of the crushing zone in a head-on collision accident.