OPTIMUM METHOD FOR THE COMPUTER-BASED DEVELOPMENT OF SHIP FORMS

The Maierform concern takes advantage of up-to-date equipment in its long-established work on the design and fairing of hull forms, and the increased capacity and capabilities of computer installations in recent years have made it apparent that a chain system, as far as possible continuous, should be developed to cover hull design from the preliminary design of hull lines, via frames, offsets, and hydrostatic calculations, to data on structural components. This would be the only way to make an appreciable reduction in personnel costs and processing time. The Author discusses a hull-lines design program that promises to be an important constituent of such a system. The many requirements of the program are listed; these objectives were achieved by a team of engineers and programmes. The principles used in developing the program are described, together with an outline of its various routines and some data on the run times. A number of body plans, examples of output from the program (as obtained by a copier from the screen of a Tektronix 4015-1 terminal), are reproduced and discussed. They show that a single well-faired prototype can be matched with a high degree of accuracy to almost all the requirements of a particular project. All important alternative solutions can be produced fully automatically and very quickly. If local modifications are still necessary, they can be made by reverting to the fairing routine in order to obtain a modified prototype. The Maierform companies have at their disposal a very large number of highly-developed hull-lines designs whose hydrodynamic properties are known through model tests and have been confirmed in sea trials and in service; the designs can be used as high-grade prototypes. This new and exceptionally flexible computer-aided design method is conceivably the best tool for producing optimum hull forms.