SMM 2016 OSV Design Opti­miza­tion Challenge

The world’s leading maritime trade fair SMM 2016 is cur­rently taking place in Hamburg, Germany. This year, we decided to go there, and run a com­pe­ti­tion for the opti­miza­tion of a ship hull design. We have picked a demo offshore supply vessel (OSV) geometry, where SMM atten­dees can change the hull design manually by a selected set of para­me­ters, cal­cu­late hydro­sta­tic values for this new design and run a CFD sim­u­la­tion. The CFD com­pu­ta­tion returns a char­ac­ter­is­tic per­for­mance value (the drag force in lon­gi­tu­di­nal direc­tion) which needs to be min­i­mized. In addition, some con­straints need to be ful­filled, such as the minimum dis­place­ment. The ​“designer” of the best ship hull finally wins the chal­lenge and a nice price. Here is a short video that demon­strates it: 

A Short Walk-Through

We have set up a web-based appli­ca­tion that can be run in a browser on an iPad, while both the geometry regen­er­a­tion in CAESES® and the CFD analysis run on a remote machine. In the first step, the par­tic­i­pant enters a name for the design candidate:

In the second step, one can change the shape of the entrance, as well as the position of the forward and aft shoul­ders, of the ship hull. The ship hull imme­di­ately adjusts to the new values, i.e., a new geometry is gen­er­ated and shown in the browser.

While changing the design vari­ables, the hydro­sta­tic cal­cu­la­tion is trig­gered in CAESES®, and the results are dis­played in the inter­face. If the dis­place­ment is ok (it needs to be larger than a given lower limit), as well as the meta­cen­tric height is large enough, the par­tic­i­pant can press the ​“RUN” button to start the CFD sim­u­la­tion. For this demo model, we prepared a simple poten­tial flow CFD setup that returns results very quickly. We used the CFD code ν‑SHALLO from HSVA. When running the CFD, a ​“pending” state is indi­cated in the interface:

As soon as the sim­u­la­tion has finished, the numer­i­cal results and the post-pro­cess­ing data is returned to the inter­face for an assessment:

After com­mit­ting, the results are stored in the pro­jec­t’s data base, where we track the hydro­dy­namic per­for­mance of all gen­er­ated ship hulls. The com­pe­ti­tion is still running and we are eager to see who is going to win this chal­lenge. You want to try it out? Watch out for the FRIEND­SHIP SYSTEMS guys with an iPad …

More Infor­ma­tion

Just get in touch with us if you want to meet us at the SMM 2016, or if you are inter­ested in further details. More infor­ma­tion about CAESES® can be found on our product pages.