Multidisciplinary Design Optimization of a Naval Surface Combatant

While shape optimal design has received considerable attention in many industrial contexts, the application of automatic optimization procedures to hydrodynamic ship design has not yet reached the same maturity. Nevertheless, numerical tools, combin- ing together modern computational fluid dynamics and optimization methods, can aid in the ship design, enhancing the operational performances and reducing development and construction costs. This paper represents an attempt of applying a multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) procedure to the enhancement of the performances of an existing ship. At the present stage the work involves modeling, development, and imple- mentation of algorithms only for the hydrodynamic optimization. For a naval surface combatant, the DTMB model ship 5415, a three-objective functions optimization for a two- discipline design problem is devised and solved in the framework of the MDO approach. A simple decision maker is used to order the Pareto optimal solutions, and a gradient- based refinement is performed on the selected design.