NavCad Premium Offers Integrated Design Optimization

HydroComp NavCad is the internationally-recognized as the gold-standard for resistance and propulsion prediction for naval architects, and with the introduction of the Premium Edition, NavCad is now able to provide integrated support for design optimization. 

Coupled with a third-party application for administrative and optimization tasks, NavCad Premium is the ideal simulation solver for Rapid Design Space Optimization (RDSO).

The ship design process usually follows a path from a starting “parent” toward an optimized solution that meets certain design objectives. The set of all possible solutions is the design space. Design Space Optimization is simply the analytical narrowing of this limitless scope to the better solutions.

Why RDSO is important?

It is critical to establish and confirm the big design decisions early in the design spiral, and detailed design optimization by CFD or model testing is made more efficient and effective when predicated by knowledge from an initial RDSO study.

The advent of more affordable and accessible CFD offers exciting possibilities for DSO in naval architectural offices – and one can make the optimization and analysis from CFD more effective by using NavCad Premium to “set the table” for it. 

A preparatory RDSO study establishes a starting geometry for CFD that is substantially closer to the final outcome, greatly increasing the success of analyzed designs and the value of CFD. 

In addition to quickly narrowing the design space, NavCad Premium can also be used to assign confidence and validate the CFD model. Its predictions are quantitatively very reliable and robust, allowing follow-on CFD prediction values (such as resistance or propulsor thrust) to be judged against the predictions generated by NavCad Premium during its RDSO investigation.

To insure that overall process efficiency and cost-effectiveness of a design solution is as high as possible, it is necessary to make use of RDSO. A NavCad Premium RDSO solution insures that a company’s potent CFD resources start with the best initial “parent” and can therefore focus on detailed optimization and validation of results.

HydroComp, Inc. was established in 1984 to provide powering analysis services to naval architects and shipbuilders.