• Dr. Chi Yang
  • George Mason University
  • Holden Auditorium
  • 4:00 p.m.

With the rapid development of computer hardware and software, large-scale computational simulations are making significant contributions to many important areas of ship hydrodynamics. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in particular is proving to
be extremely useful in the hydrodynamic analysis and design of ships. The future of the CFD in ship hydrodynamics is to improve available CFD tools and integrate them in a comprehensive simulation environment to predict and study ship behaviors at sea and perform hydrodynamic design optimization of ship hulls.

An integrated graphic user interface (GUI) toolkit for ship hydrodynamic analysis and hull form optimization has been developed. The main components of this toolkit consist of a practical design-oriented simple CFD tool and an advanced CFD tool; a hull surface representation and modification module; and an optimization module. The simple CFD
tool can be used for the preliminary and early stages of the hydrodynamic design of hulls, and the advanced CFD tool for the detailed flow analysis at late stages of the hydrodynamic design of hulls. Both the simple CFD tool and the advanced CFD tool have been improved and further validated. New hull surface representation and modification techniques have been developed to allow both local and global modifications of the hull form with any given constraints during the hydrodynamic
optimization process. It can also be used to conduct parametric studies of the hull hydrodynamic performances. In addition, the new hull surface modification technique can be used to generate an initial hull form to satisfy the design needs first before
performing the optimization. Various optimization techniques are implemented in the optimization module to satisfy different optimization requirements. An overview of the recent advances in both the simple CFD tool and the advanced CFD tool, and the application of the toolkit to both single and multi-objective hydrodynamic optimization problems will be presented. The first version of the ship design and hull form optimization software will be introduced. This software can be further developed and enhanced, so that it can be used not only by naval architects for routine hull form design and hydrodynamic analysis, but also for the education of future naval architects.