Thorough, clear and informative, Ship Structural Analysis and Design focuses on the most complex aspects of ship structural design — preliminary design. While concept and detail design are concerned with overall requirements and standard formats, it is in preliminary design — the sizing of all of the ship’s principal structural members — that the structural designer has the largest number of significant decisions and options, and the greatest scope for the optimizing the design.

The text uses a rationally-based design approach (design from first principles), which is ideally suited to preliminary structural design. One of the advantages of this approach is that, unlike all earlier design methods, it applies to all types of ships. Moreover, this approach allows the designer to achieve an optimum structure, according to his own particular measure of merit, such as least life-cycle cost, least weight, or any combination of these. As in the original book, the underlying theory has been verified through extensive testing and implemented in MAESTRO, a leading ship structural design program.