SBIR-STTR Award

Accurate prediction of the structural responses of ships to extreme seaway loadings is important in the early phases of ship design. The currently used methods, in general, are not accurate enough. The rosas3 program is the best available, but has certain limitations and is difficult for design engineers to use. This proposal presents a systemmatic approach and feasible plan to improve the rosas3 program: more comprehensive documentation will be prepared; a preprocessor will be developed so that most of the difficult input data will be calculated by the computer through shcp and smp; rosas3 will be modified to increase its accuracy and improve the efficiency of its use.

An accurate prediction of the structural responses of ships to extreme seaway loadings is important in all the phases of ship design. The currently used methods, in general, are not accurate enough. The rosas3 computer programs can be the best available design tool once it is completed. This proposal presents a systematic approach and work plan to complete the rosa3 program. The phase ii effort will complete the determination of non-linear hydrodynamic forces, examine the effects of various wave forms, adding the capability to calculate structural responses due to slamming loads, idealize the hull modeling scheme, improve and expand documentation of rosa3 initiated in phase i, develop an input data preprocessor utilizing the computer program hulstrx, new snappy, smp, and smpoff to considerably reduce time spent on tedious manual calculations, and develop a computer graphics pre-processor to readily display program results.