Method involving shape-morphing of multiple hull forms aimed at organizing and visualizing the propulsive performance of optimal ship designs

Abstract

Most cases of successfully designed hull forms developed using conventional nonlinear optimization methods propose the optimal candidates in a particular design constraint. Furthermore, these optimal designs contain uncertainties in terms of the evaluation parameters and design conditions, thereby raising the issue of robustness of the design idea that the designer needs to investigate to arrive at a decision for building the expensive structure of a ship. This paper proposes a method to organize and visualize the propulsive performance of any number of hull form combinations. The shape morphing technique, which has been limited to the blending of two or three hull forms, is extended to the shape morphing of N hull forms by introducing the concept of the barycentric coordinate system. Thus, a hull-form coordinate system with each hull form as a basis is proposed. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated by analyzing several hull-form design spaces. This method can contribute to improving the robustness of the optimal solution obtained by nonlinear optimization and machine learning, by analyzing and visualizing the design space around the optimal point.