Optimization Modelling of a Catamaran Hull Form towards Reducing Ship’s Total Resistance

Abstract

Due to the increasing of fuel prices and volatile of environmental regulations, it is a challenge for Naval Architects to design a ship dealing with an optimum ship’s total resistance. The conventional design of catamaran hull has not satisfied yet to reduce the ship’s total resistance, RT. This paper presents a numerical investigation into gaining sufficient reduction of the ship’s total resistance of catamaran through optimizing her hull form. To achieve this research objectives, a numerical optimization modelling coupled with a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach has been successfully conducted. Several parameters such as length, beam and draft of catamaran hull have been taken into account towards reducing the ship’s total resistance. Here, the simulation constraints are applied to obtain the optimum dimension, where the length, beam and draft of the catamaran hull were optimized within the range of 1.2 m to 1.5 m, 0.11 m to 0.14 m and 0.07 m to 0.08 m, respectively. In general, the optimization simulation revealed that the optimum dimension of the catamaran hull resulted in reduction of the total ship’s resistance. The results showed that the optimum length, beam and draft of hull led to reduce RT by 21.08%, 16.95% and 17.91%, respectively. Merely, this numerical optimization simulation provides a useful way for reducing the total ship’s resistance of the catamaran at the preliminary design stage.