Trimaran Hull Ship Design Using The Morphing Design Method

Trimaran vessels have attracted considerable attention recently due to the many new high-speed ship projects associated with them. The hull forms and positioning of the side hulls significantly influence the wave interference effect between the main and side hulls of trimaran ships. In this study, a morphing design method is applied to hull designs to secure numerous alternative hull forms. Morphing is a geometric interpolation technique capable of generating intermediate forms among source models. This study adopted 2D curve morphing. Both single- and multi-target (two-parent and three-parent) morphing were intro for trimaran hull form generation. The three-parer morphing method employed 21 hull forms each for the main and side hulls. Resistance of the generated hull forms were compared with those of non-morphed models. In addition this study considered five different side hull lengths different longitudinal positions, and five different late side hull positions. Thus, in total, 55,125 (21x21x5x5x5) cases were analysed for resistance prediction. It was found that different hull forms require different side hull configurations to achieve minimum resistance or minimum fuel consumption despite travelling at the same speed. The morphing method could produce a large number of feasible hull forms almost instantaneously; moreover, this technique resulted in hull forms that could provide the designated performance in terms of minimum resistance and fuel consumption. Thus, the morphing design method is a useful additional tool for trimaran hull design optimization.