Damage visualization and vulnerability assessment of surface ship considering the 3D multihit location of air-explosion threat

The purpose of this study is to propose a method for rapidly assessing the hit locations and extent of damage to a naval ship attacked by threatening weapons. An integrated method is presented for assessing the vulnerability to the hull and systems caused by the blast or penetrating effects of a weapon at multiple possible impact locations. The proposed method enables the assessment of vulnerability changes for design alternatives during the early design phase of naval vessels. To predict the extent of damage and to visualize the damaged hull and equipment, it is first assumed that a weapon has multiple hit locations. It is shown that a set of possible hit locations was generated by assuming the trajectory for air-explosion (AIREX) weapons by dividing the trajectory into an air-to-ship trajectory and a ship-to-ship trajectory. To account for the non-deterministic nature of weapon hits, a probability distribution approach was used to generate random multiple hit locations for each trajectory while the hit locations of AIREX in all directions were predicted using a multivariate probability distribution that generates three-dimensional random hit points. The extent of damage was then calculated, taking into account the topology of the hull structure and the equipment installed within the hull compartment, along with the damage volume associated with the weapon at each hit point. To identify the damage volume, axis-aligned bounding box (AABB) components were used, which provide a simplified representation of the ship’s geometry, as well as the relative position and dimensions of the hull structure and installed equipment. The damage compartment was defined as the portion of the hull that overlapped the damaged volume. While AABB’s overlap detection algorithm was applied to the damaged hull compartments, the algorithm identified the equipment that overlapped the damaged volume of the hull. Finally, the geometric modeling module, the probabilistic multiple hit location prediction module, and the damage analysis module were developed for damage visualization and vulnerability assessment.