Hull Form Design and Optimization Tool Development

Abstract : George Mason University's (GMU) Center for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CCFD) is working with the Naval Surface Warfare Center's (NSWC) Center for Innovation in Ship Design (CISD) under a five year grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) aimed at developing and validating hull form design and hydrodynamic optimization tools. These tools will be used for early stage ship design and education of junior naval engineers. The categories of the tools can be further broken down into tools for hull form generation, representation and modification, design-oriented simple Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) tools, and hull form optimization tools. This paper will discuss the further development of these tools including the implementation and testing of a new optimization algorithm, the improvement of a rapid hull form generation tool (HulGen), and the creation of a user interface for a SWATH resistance and powering prediction program (SWAD). The work was performed under the 2012 Naval Research Enterprise Intern Program.