Transformation Of Ship Panel Structure Data Among Principal Ship CADs

In recent years, the CAD technology is becoming more popular with the shipyards and institutions in China. TRIBON, CADDS5 and CATIA as the representative of the mainstream of CADs are constantly upgrading the level of ship design and manufacture. TRIBON known as"Ship Design and Manufacturing Expert"is currently the most widely used in the field of the produce stage in shipyards. In spite of above, TRIBON has its own limitation. There is bad at three-dimensional graphics and topology modeling. CATIA are being more and more accepted by users in the detailed design stage of ships with its easy-going interface and intelligent model tree structure. It allows users to duplicate the product changes quickly and easily. Because of the different design stages TRIBON and CATIA being using in, the structure which is modeled in CATIA always need to be remodeled in TRIBON, which potentially increases the workload of ship design and manufacturing.Based on the analysis and research of the CATIA and TRIBON model data structure, this paper developed an efficient method to transform the ship structure from CATIA to TRIBON. This method developed the secondary development software attached to CATIA to extract the geometry and attribute information. It could improve the accuracy of the transformation by controlling the accuracy of the extracted data. Utilizing the developed plug-in software merged these data into one document and mapped them into an effective TRIBON document format. Then, an import interface was developed in TRIBON. Finally, we used remodeling functions of TRIBON to complete the transformation efficiently. The whole transformation contains the panel hull, the standard part, etc. Several successful examples of the data transformation prove that this method is an effective tool for the data transformation among different CAD soft wares.