OPTIMISATION OF HULL FORM OF OCEAN-GOING TRAWLER

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for optimising the hull form of ocean-going trawlers to decrease resistance and consequently reduce the energy consumption. The entire optimisation process was managed by the integration of computer-aided design and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in the CAESES software. Resistance was simulated using the CFD solver and STAR-CCM+. The ocean-going trawler was investigated under two main navigation conditions: trawling and design. Under the trawling condition, the main hull of the trawler was modified using the Lackenby method and optimised by NSGA-II algorithm and Sobol + Tsearch algorithm. Under the design condition, the bulbous bow was changed using the free-form deformation method, and the trawler was optimised by NSGA-Ⅱ. The best hull form is obtained by comparing the ship resistance under various design schemes. Towing experiments were conducted to measure the navigation resistance of trawlers before and after optimisation, thus verifying the reliability of the optimisation results. The results show that the proposed optimisation method can effectively reduce the resistance of trawlers under the two navigation conditions.