Adam Sobey School of Engineering Sciences, University of Southampton, UK Concurrent Engineering in the Context of FRP Boats 1. Background Acknowledgements Project sponsored by the British Marine Federation and EPSRC 2. Aims The margin between a profitable and non-profitable design and build are small. Foreign companies have a larger percentage of the yacht market than British companies. This requires that UK companies become more innovative in design and try to use new materials and structures and production technologies in order to generate new, market-leading designs that are cost effective to manufacture. Fluid and Structure Interactions Research Group, School of Engineering Sciences It has been estimated that design costs only 10-15% but that as much as 70% of the cost of a manufactured part is decided at this stage. Boat designs, therefore, should take into account important factors like production and manufacture. Rapid and timely production of new designs can open up sales opportunities in other areas. Supervisory team: Prof. R. A. Shenoi, Dr. J. I. R. Blake T1015 Fast Super-yacht made by Sealine 3. Methodology 5. Collaboration Concurrent Engineering is the process of designing, in parallel, to increase quality and reduce costs It has been successfully used in many different industries including aerospace, astronautics, F1 and shipbuilding. The design process can be broken down into areas of concept design, detailed design and production all of which will be integrated into a concurrent engineering environment. These areas start with a concept design and end in a iterative spiral optimising design and production until the final design is complete. These areas can be broken down into smaller tasks and it is important to find tools in these areas that can best help the designer. The project is sponsored by EPSRC and the British Marine Federation who are coordinating the project with industry. The project will involve collaboration with a number of boat yards including Princess, Oyster, Green Marine and VT Halmatic Tools to be developedTechniques to be used Structural ToolsGenetic Algorithms, Pareto Functions and Direct Optimisation Methods Design HistoriesNeural Networks, Fuzzy Logic and XML Schema Concurrent Engineering HubInternet Based Excel Hub Embedded in SharePoint 4. Structural Optimisation Using the above technique it is also possible to constrain the model to coincide with Lloyd’s rules Optimisation for bottom panels has been started constraining the sea conditions, and therefore the forces, and the overall size of the hull. A comparison has been done between Lloyd’s rules and grillage method. MethodMax. Moments (Nm) Max stiffness (N/mm 2 ) Max Stress (Mpa) Deflection (mm) Cost (£)Mass (kg) Lloyd’s Rules Grillage Method Results comparing Lloyd’s rules with Grillage method The strategic aim of this project is to develop a concurrent engineering system, consisting of a number of tools and a design environment, for use in the field of leisure boat design. A tool to optimise the mass and cost of stiffened panels is in development. Optimisation of the panels relies on changing the stiffener spacing, the stiffener size and thicknesses as well as the panel thickness. Panels can then be optimised using a genetic algorithm (GAs) for mass and cost. Process of design split into three main topics Current tools to being developed and techniques to be used Stiffened panel in ANSYS Process of genetic algorithm optimisation Results GAs are based on evolutionary biology and are a type of global search heuristic. The advantages of using genetic algorithms are that they search a large search space quickly without getting stuck at local optima. Problems can occur where the genetic algorithm may not fully reach the optimum value and are slower than direct methods. This can be resolved by doing a general search using Gas and finishing the search using direct methods. Discrepancies occur between the two sets of values as Lloyd’s rules builds in safety factors. The safety factors constrain the minimum thicknesses of the panels meaning that Lloyd’s rules normally create a heavier hull. Using thicknesses below that of the Lloyd’s minimum thickness is costly to get accepted meaning large benefits would be required to justify the use of a first principles approach.