Codesign Case Study of a Planing Craft with Active Control Systems

This case study presents a novel insight into the design of a codesigned planing craft with an active control system (ACS), along with its potential advantages and disadvantages when compared with a traditionally designed vessel (i.e., a vessel whose geometry is first selected, and then its ACS is implemented). This work has three purposes: 1) present tools a designer can use to codesign a planing craft with its ACS, 2) use these tools to expand the design space and further explore the potential of codesign, and 3) investigate the feasibility of having a planing craft with ACS designed to the codesign results found in 2) and compare it with a traditionally designed vessel. The vessel particulars that are numerically optimized are the beam, dead rise, longitudinal center of gravity (lcg), and two tuning parameters for the ACS's linear quadratic regulator. In the case study, the codesigned vessel had 4% lower drag at the design speed and Sea State (SS) 3, but on lower SS's it had drag savings of 10% and seakeeping improvements of around 40% for the investigated seakeeping metric. The case study suggests that although the codesigned vessel is technically feasible, it would require unconventional hull/deck design-a result which emphasizes the importance of considering the coupling between a planing craft and its ACS early in the concept design.