Weight Reduction of a Ship Crane Truss Structure Made of Composites

Weight reduction remains a relevant topic for various ship structures, as it can improve their seagoing capacity, especially for high-speed and light-craft vessels, and make deck equipment more efficient. The introduction of new lightweight composite materials and the development of new processing technologies and computer modeling tools open up new opportunities in equipment design, but also require new design approaches, including those based on optimization techniques. This article presents an engineering technique for optimizing the design of a ship’s crane manipulator boom based on modern computer simulation tools and numerical optimization methods. The loads on the crane arising due to the ship’s motion were obtained and specified, and the requirements for the finite element model for strength and stability analysis were derived. Constructive, technological, and resource constraints were then derived to reduce the number of independent optimization parameters. The mass reduction problem was set and solved by combining the screening method and the Jaya algorithm. Applying this developed technique for optimizing the crane boom structure using 465 parameters, an 18% reduction in mass was achieved.