Minimum weight design of submersible pressure hull under hydrostatic pressure

Abstract

In this study, we proposed a minimum weight design of a submarine pressure hull under hydrostatic pressure with constraints on factors such as general instability, buckling of shell between frames, plate yielding, and frame yielding. A typical submarine pressure hull is also adopted for a prototype model. This design problem is not only formulated as a discrete nonlinear, nondifferentiable, multimodal constrained minimization problem, but also solved by using the backtrack programming method. Results in this study indicate that the solution for the optimal model's weight reduces an average 6.65% more than the prototype model. The process in this study is favorable for the submersible pressure hull design process.