ShipLINES

ShipLINES offers users with an interesting and convenient to use program which produces a B-Spline surface of a single-screw cargo ship hull form with and without bulb based on 25 geometric parameters. Most of these are used to define local appendages such as the bulb and shaped skeg. The control polygon of the hull surface is specified directly around the areas of the stem, midship section, transom and skeg. The rows of the surface are blended in between taking account of the parallel middle body. Unfortunately, this construction technique and the requirement to produce both bulb and skeg in the surface place a significant constraint on the surface definition such that it is not possible to control the hydrostatic properties independently of the other input parameters. Despite this, the surfaces produced by this technique are reasonably good as the effect of the high level of constraint results only in a reduction in the range of hull shapes that can be produced

Originally, the ShipLINES hull generator aimed to apply the same approach used in YachtLINES to ship hull forms. One of the most important characteristics identified during development was that surface fairness could be clearly be identified by equivalent fairness and distribution of points in the control polygon. Compared with yacht hull forms, ships have the potential for many more different shapes and with the parametric hull generation approach each of these shapes needed to be described using numbers. This results in many parameters with unclear descriptions and relationships to the physical parts of the surface which are being controlled.

Requirements:

• Windows All