Design of a river-sea ship by optimization

This paper deals with the shape optimization problem of an innovative RSS (River-Sea Ship) designed in such a way to achieve an improved dynamic behaviour in both river and sea navigation conditions. The solution of this problem can effectively allow an efficient exploitation of the potential capability of inland waterways in freight transport. For simulation purposes a three degrees of freedom dynamic model of the ship is used together with a nonlinear rigid-body model in order to exploit the aero-hydrodynamic slender body theory to derive forces and moments acting on the ship. An SQP (Sequential Quadratic Programming) method is then used to solve the related nonlinear optimization problem by means of BFGS (Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno) alghorithm.