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The seakeeping behavior of a ship in waves is different from its behavior in calm water. The resistance and seakeeping performance of a ship are of great importance and must be considered in the early-stage design of a ship’s hull form design. Therefore, this paper proposes a hull form optimization framework aiming to achieve the minimum total resistance in waves using a CFD technique. A sinusoidal wave is adopted to establish the numerical wave tank and the overset mesh technique is used to facilitate the motions of the ships in question. Considering the motions of pitching and heaving, the total resistance of the hull in waves is regarded as the objective function which is calculated using the Reynolds averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) method. The arbitrary shape deformation (ASD) technique is used to change the geometry. Under displacement and design variables, a hybrid algorithm is developed to evaluate the objective function combining the optimal Latin hypercube design (Opt LHD) and the non-linear programming by quadratic Lagrangian (NLPQL) algorithm. Finally, two examples of hull form optimization are presented and discussed for David Taylor Model Basin (DTMB) model 5512 and WIGLEY III cases. The results show the effectiveness of the optimization framework developed in the present study, which can lay the foundation for further optimization of full-scale ships.

Based on the theoretical analysis about ultrasonic wave’s reflection and refraction coefficient at ceramic-oil interface (COI) and ceramic-air interface (CAI), the paper studies the ultrasonic echo characteristics at COI and CAI of oil-filled porcelain cable termination(OFPCT) by experiments. The study shows that under the same condition, the first interface echo height of ultrasonic at COI is about 2dB higher than that at the COI, which can be easily inundated by defective coupling. However, the difference of the amplitude of echo attenuation and the echo times at two interfaces is relatively obvious. Based on the experimental result, the paper puts forward the ultrasonic method to detect oil level of OFPCT.

In order to reduce the total resistance of a hull, an optimization framework for the bulbous bow optimization was presented. The total resistance in calm water was selected as the objective function, and the overset mesh technique was used for mesh generation. RANS method was used to calculate the total resistance of the hull. In order to improve the efficiency and smoothness of the geometric reconstruction, the arbitrary shape deformation (ASD) technique was introduced to change the shape of the bulbous bow. To improve the global search ability of the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, an improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) algorithm was proposed to set up the optimization model. After a series of optimization analyses, the optimal hull form was found. It can be concluded that the simulation based design framework built in this paper is a promising method for bulbous bow optimization.

With the rapid development of the computational technology, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools have been widely used to evaluate the ship hydrodynamic performances in the hull forms optimization. However, it is very time consuming since a great number of the CFD simulations need to be performed for one single optimization. It is of great importance to find a high-effective method to replace the calculation of the CFD tools. In this study, a CFD-based hull form optimization loop has been developed by integrating an approximate method to optimize hull form for reducing the total resistance in calm water. In order to improve the optimization accuracy of particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, an improved PSO (IPSO) algorithm is presented where the inertia weight coefficient and search method are designed based on random inertia weight and convergence evaluation, respectively. To improve the prediction accuracy of total resistance, a data prediction method based on IPSO-Elman neural network (NN) is proposed. Herein, IPSO algorithm is used to train the weight coefficients and self-feedback gain coefficient of ElmanNN. In order to build IPSO-ElmanNN model, optimal Latin hypercube design (Opt LHD) is used to design the sampling hull forms, and the total resistance (objective function) of these hull forms are calculated by Reynolds averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) method. For the purpose of this paper, this optimization framework has been employed to optimize two ships, namely, the DTMB5512 and WIGLEY III ships, and these hull forms are changed by arbitrary shape deformation (ASD) technique. The results show that the optimization framework developed in this study can be used to optimize hull forms with significantly reduced computational effort.