It has been argued that a major shortcoming in the International Maritime Organization (IMO) Interim Guidelines for Approval of Alternative Methods of Design and Construction of Oil Tankers in Collision and Grounding is that grounding and collision damages normalized by the main dimensions of the ship have the same probability density distributions regardless of a particular structural design and ship size.
The present paper explores analytical methods for assessing the overall effect of structural design on the damage distributions in accidental grounding and collisions. The results are expressed in simple expressions involving structural dimensions and the building material of the ships. The study shows that the density distribution for collision and grounding damages normalized by the main dimensions of the ship depends on the size of the ship. A larger ship has a higher probability of a larger relative damage length than that of a smaller ship in grounding damage. On the other hand, the damages to the side structure caused by ship collisions are found to be relatively smaller for large ships.
The main conclusion is that the existing IMO damage distributions will severely underestimate the grounding damages to the bottom structure of larger vessels and to a lesser extent overestimate collision damages to the side structure of the hull.