A physics-based two-dimensional reduced order model for hydro-elastoplastic response of panel under bow flare slamming impact: Validation and application

While high-fidelity methods, such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)- Finite Element Analysis (FEA) coupling, can accurately capture structural collapse under severe slamming when the modeling and analysis conditions are appropriately specified, their high computational cost makes them impractical for repeated use in early-stage design or risk screening. In this paper, a physics-based two-dimensional reduced-order model (ROM) is proposed and developed to efficiently estimate the dynamic elastic-plastic response of plate panels between stiffeners subjected to slamming loads. The proposed ROM is based on a 1-DoF model originally proposed by Yankelevsky. The model consists of a mass-spring system, with the spring element modeled by a bilinear elastic-plastic constitutive law. Slamming-induced time history of pressure, obtained from Chuang's formulation, is applied as an external force. The model captures the dynamic and subsequent plastic responses and accounts for in-plane membrane forces that suppress transverse deformation. The hydro-elastoplastic response of a plate panel, idealized as a unit-width strip supported by adjacent stiffeners, is calculated by numerically integrating the equation of motion. The proposed ROM is validated by comparing its results with experimental data and further verified against results from CFD–FEA coupled simulations. The proposed ROM reduces the computational cost by about four orders of magnitude compared with the two-way CFD–FEA coupling, from about 1.5 × 10 5 s on 64 cores to about 3 s on a single core.