SHIP HULL SURFACE USING FINITE ELEMENTS

The paper describes a new method using finite elements for ship hull surface design. A constrained variational principle is proposed in which the fairness criterion is included in the actual functional and the given design coefficients are as constraints. Constraints can be treated by using Lagrangian multipliers or penalty functions. The finite element method is used to solve the variational problem. The final resulting equations in both the cases are derived. Some examples employing rectangular and triangular elements are presented.