Computer Aided Ship Design: A New Tools Suite For Management, Tracing, Unfolding And Nesting Of Shells

Several softwares are available in the market to support the ship design process. A common limit of these tools is related to the integration among existing CAD systems. Moreover the integration of expert system into conventional CAD systems is difficult and disadvantageous. In this work a software environment for the management of geometric models of ship structural parts is proposed. The main innovations are described, such as the shell unfolding and the nesting procedure adopted. The software tools are developed in RhinoPython and integrated in Rhinoceros V5 mainly for the following reasons: the diffusion of Rhinoceros in the ship design context, the favourable cost/performance ratio of the software, the ability to manage NURBS surfaces, the availability of specific plugins (e.g. Orca3D) which cover other ship buliding design stages. The results show a reduction in data exchange related troubles , a reduction on the overall time for completing the ship design process, a robust support in the surface unfolding phase and a significant improvement of the nesting procedure proposed.