A study of the effect of slamming on sandwich panels

Anyone who has seen recent footage of the Velux 5 Oceans Race - or even sailed around the buoys in a local fleet race - can attest to the fact that sailing yachts live in a world that is far from static. Similarly, sportsfisher motorboats and patrol craft crash through waves on a daily basis.  The current scantling codes used in the design of these vessels are based on the application of uniformly distributed quasi-static pressures on shell panels - a loading scenario that is far from reality.

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