HULL FORM OPTIMISATION OF FISHING VESSELS FOR SUPERIOR SEAKEEPING PERFORMANCE

In this paper an extended application of the Bales' rank criterion is carried out for optimising the seakeeping qualities of fishing vessels from the concept and preliminary design stages. The mathematical model is quantified by means of a large amount of vertical plane ship responses for a family of homogeneous hull forms of equal displacement, taking into consideration the overall operative conditions of typical ocean routes. In the model, the hull geometry of the vessel is related to a global seakeeping merit index in order to evaluate the influence of main characteristics in determining the behaviour in a seaway. The reliability of the proposed model for early-design synthesis has been confirmed and an optimum seakeeping hull has been designed. A comparison of seakeeping performance of the optimum hull clearly shows its superiority with respect to the hulls stored in the database.