Virtual Prototyping
The goal is to design the double hull of a catamaran in order to reduce as much as possible the expected value of the average resistance in the field of irregular waves increasing, at the same time, the maneuverability of the boat.
The Challenge
We want to take advantage of the HF-URANS (High-Fidelity Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes) simulator to get very accurate results of the boat design performance. The challenge is to insert the simulation model into an automatic optimization procedure while keeping computational costs and time low.
The Solution
By training a network of radial basis functions, we build a surrogate model (called SRBF) of the simulator. This model has very low computation times but accuracies comparable to those of the high-fidelity model. We can thus exploit it within a global and multi-objective optimization method that, properly hybridized with local techniques, quickly produced an optimal solution.
Results and Benefits
The new simulator allows to support the design through the use of a virtual prototype for rapid simulation and an optimizer to identify the optimal parameters.
