SHIP HULL OPTIMISATION ON A DESKTOP COMPUTER

Considering the trends in the modern shipbuilding industry, it is obvious that fuel consumption and exhaust emissions have become more important than ever, therefore ship efficiency improvements are mandatory. In order to tackle this problem, an automatic ship hull optimisation loop is proposed. To reduce the required computational power and time, a linearised free surface solver was used, which needs approx. 75 minutes to reach a converged solution on one Intel Core i5-4570 processor (with 4 cores). Changes to the hull geometry were done by an automatic mesh motion solver and the optimisation loop was controlled with the Dakota toolkit. Preliminary results show that the suggested optimisation loop is promising but a better parametrisation of the ship’s hull will be investigated in the future work.