Utveckling av ett verktyg för konstruktion och optimering av små farkoster

Sammanfattning: It is very beneficial to minimize the weight of a ship as much as possible in order to reduce fuel costs. The weight depends a lot on the structural arrangment, which makes it the ship designers job to keep it lightweight. Design tools today are specialized for large ships and are expensive to use. Today, the company ASV Global who designs small craft vessels, uses large spreadsheet for their calculations and optimization. This report presents the development of a program that can build the structural model of small vessels, use regulatory rules to calculate the structural integrity and optimize the structural arrangement for the minimum weight. The program is coded in Python 3, using an object-oriented-programming approach. The code is designed to be highly modular as this project is just the beginning of the program and will acquire many updates and changes. All of the requirements of the program’s functionality are written by ASV. Two stiffened panels in different locations were modelled and validated against an already existing vessel. The rules that were used are from the standard ISO 12215, which are for small craft vessels of 2-24 meters. An optimization method was created and tested against one of the stiffened panels, which showed a possible weight reduction of 34%. The optimization method produces different combinations of the design variables, which are defined in vectors/lists by the user. Then an excel report is created that highlights the optimum solutions and other important information, using conditional formatting.