A tool for ship hull surface healing and domain preparation for downstream applications

Abstract

This paper presents an automatic ship hull form CAD data repairing and domain preparing tool. The tool is capable to repair commonly found geometrical and topological inconsistencies in and between parametric and triangulated surfaces. Parametric surfaces are read from initial graphics exchange specification (IGES) file format and triangulated surfaces are read from standard tessellated language (STL) file format. Based on the repaired hull form parametric surfaces, automatic domain preparation strategies are implemented for mesh generators such as Numeca HEXPRESS and Open FOAMs SnappyHexMesh. Region identification method is developed to divide the hull form into different regions and export the repaired and consistent geometry in coloured STL file format. The repair, domain preparation, and region identification algorithms are tested against several ship hull form representations to evaluate the tool robustness. The results achieved reveal that the developed tool substantially decreases the time, and therefore cost, required for CAD data repairing and domain preparation for downstream application.