Recent decades of ship design and construction have produced numerous examples of innovative and special-purpose hull forms, structures, speeds, size and complexity. These include progressively larger container ships, ultra-large crude carriers and cruise vessels, liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers, high-speed catamarans, small-waterplane-area twin-hull (SWATH) vessels, trimarans and others. The geometries, structural topologies and materials required for these vessels did not fit well with traditional design methods and procedures, rooted in empirical approaches. Instead, these ships and their structures required some form of direct analysis or first-principles approach, which by its nature is computer based. The ship design and design approval community responded to this new set of requirements by developing and implementing new procedures, new methods and new technologies to adequately address the need for first principles in the design. This design methodology innovation in turn placed new and significant demands on the state of the design software environment under which the new methods and procedures were being developed. This paper traces some of the innovative ship types that have evolved over recent decades and the associated computer-based structural design technology evolution during this time. In particular, the innovations of Professor Owen Hughes in establishing a first-principles approach to ship structural design, documenting the theoretical basis for this approach in the textbook Ship Structural Design: A Rationally-Based, Computer-Aided, Optimization Approach, and developing the MAESTRO computer-based implementation of the methodology are presented
Historical perspective on the structural design of special ships and the evolution of structural design methods
Ships and Offshore Structures ; 8 , 3-4 ; 404-414
2013-06-01
11 pages
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
Development of ships' structural design
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