Ship Hull Design

The shape of a ship hull design is chosen to strike a balance between cost, internal arrangement, structural integrity, hydrostatics, hydrodynamics, and special considerations for the ship’s role. Finding the right balance can be a complex optimization problem that lends itself to the approach of simulation-driven design, which – over the last decades – has developed from “simple” wave resistance optimizations based on potential flow codes, to much more comprehensive studies based on RANS codes, often under consideration of multiple operation points and several different disciplines. To realize such an approach, it is crucial to have an excellent control over the properties of the ship hull, as well as a suitable workflow that brings together all the necessary components.

CAESES’ Ship Hull Design Capabilities

CAESES® is a dedicated CAD and automation environment for exploring and optimizing complex and performance-critical geometries (see also this overview on marine applications). In particular, it brings along several key capabilities for designing cutting-edge ship hull geometries:

• Complete parametric modeling capabilities for any type of hull, including container ships, tankers, bulkers, ferries, cruise ships, catamarans, yachts, planning hulls, etc.

• Smart parametric modeling approach based on parameterized cross-sections and continuous control of the respective input parameters.

• High level of customization, i.e., no black box models, and full freedom to set up user-defined workflows.
• Alternatively, morphing methods (generic or marine-specific, like Lackenby shift) can be used to deform an existing – imported – geometry. The morphing can be applied to a NURBS surface geometry and be exported as IGES/STEP/etc., or to a discretized geometry such as meshes or tessellations.

• High robustness and flexibility of parametric models for reliable automated ship hull design studies and optimization.

• Computations of basic hydrostatics, i.e. upright hydrostatics and intact stability.

• Automated generation of line drawings from the 3D model.

• Support of offset and panel data.
• Generic interface for connecting to arbitrary external simulation tools (e.g. ANSYS CFX and FLUENT, FINE/Marine, STAR-CCM+, OpenFOAM etc.) and dedicated interface for Shipflow.
• Interactive editor for NAPA ship hull form definitions.
• Handling of constraints typical of ship design, including displacement, stability, center of buoyancy, hard points (engine foundations, containers, tanks, thrusters …), number of containers in hold, spaces, and more.

Learn More

Ship Hull Design with CAESES – Do it yourself!

1. Test the online demo model below.

2. Download CAESES®, register for a trial license, and open the double-ended ferry sample file downloaded in the previous step (this webinar recording provides some context for this geometry).

3. Watch the corresponding video for explanations on how the model is set up.

4. Create a geometry from scratch with the ship hull modeling tutorials in CAESES®.

Case Studies and Blog Posts for Ship Hull Design

Questions ?

Please do not hesitate to get in touch with us if you have questions in the context of your specific application. We look forward to discussing it together with you!