A new method for parametric design of hull surface based on energy optimization

Abstract

A method for parametric design of hull surface based on energy optimization is presented. This method aims to obtaining the fairness hull surface based on NURBS. The traditional design method, based on the offsets to express ship form, does not really reflect the characteristics of the hull surface and is not easy to modify ship form. Hence the energy optimization method is proposed to obtain the expression of the hull curves and surface with NURBS. Attentions are focused on extracting the design parameters which represent the characteristic of the hull. The design parameters are selected as design variables meanwhile least sum of curvature square of hull curves is set as optimization objective. The basic shape feature of hull curves and surface can be adjusted under the constraints related to interpolation points, derivative vectors, curvatures, areas and centroid points. One successful design example of a 50000DWT tanker verifies the feasibility and practicality of this method. This method has a better performance in the design variability and model remodeling without relying on parent data, which realizes further fairness of the ship hull surface.