Ship Engineering Framework for Integrated Rapid Design & Multidisciplinary Analyses

Ship engineering is an iterative process requiring multi-user and multidisciplinary collaboration at various stages of the design cycle from the early concept to the final detailing stages. This process follows a design spiral, as the requirements from each discipline are addressed sequentially. Although the research community has developed many computational tools for analysis in each individual discipline, the interaction across the disciplines is limited and often manual. Integrating the design and analysis processes at all stages of the engineering cycle and across all disciplines would bring about a revolution in the ship industry. Development of an engineering framework for rapid design, multi-physics analysis, and optimization of naval ships is proposed. It will support a modular and object-oriented architecture incorporating rule-based design, finite element analysis modeling with feature-based parametric meshing, multidisciplinary analysis process automation, design exploration and optimization, and workflow product and process data management. It integrates the design and analysis processes through all stages of the engineering process and across all disciplines and subsystems. The proposed multidisciplinary computational modeling framework will reduce computational time and cost of Navy platform designs and introduce analysis at an early stage of the engineering process while increasing the reliability of these numerical methods.