High-precision deformation prediction for compliant parts in the ship sub-assembly process

Abstract

In the ship sub-assembly process, large compliant parts are common and generally thin. These compliant parts are normally easy to deform under the influence of gravity, which will greatly affect the accuracy of the sub-assembly processes. Thus, it is important to predict the deformation of the compliant part under a given fixture layout in advance. In current practice, existing methods of post-compensation are usually used to correct the deformation of the compliant part, which are inefficient and costly. In this paper, a transformer-based surrogate model with two-stage Latin hypercube sampling (TSM-TSS) is established. This surrogate model considers each fixture position and its deviation to predict the deformation of the entire compliant part. Compared with BPNN and Kriging, a case study reveals that TSM-TSS can predict the deformation of compliant parts with an error of 0.061mm. With the application of TSM-TSS, the deformation of the compliant part under gravity can be predicted accurately and the efficiency of shipbuilding can be improved.