Computer aided ship/boat design by using NURBS

This thesis describes a method to develop a ship/boat design software package by using NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines). In this research, a 3-D ship-hull generation method based on NURBS skinning techniques is developed. A C++ NURBS library with ship design routings is also developed. Hydrostatic and hydrodynamic computations with the regularized boundary integral equation method for solving total velocity potential around the ship hull are employed in this package. In order to develop a cross-platform system (Windows and Unix), this package is developed using Qt which provides an excellent cross-platform C++ development environment. OpenGL is used for rendering 3-D ship hulls and for visualizing computational results due to its outstanding 3-D features. Validation is carried out for an ellipsoid surface generation and hydrodynamic computation. Finally, this package is applied to predict the pressure and velocity distribution around a ship.