MultiDisciplinary Design Optimization of Surface Ships: Numerical Techniques and Experimental Verification.

While shape optimal design has received considerable attention in many industrial contests, the application of automatic optimization procedures to the hydrodynamic ship design has not yet reached the same maturity. Nevertheless, numerical tools, combining together modern computational fluid dynamics and optimization methods, can aid in the ship design, enhancing the operational performances and reducing development and construction costs. This work represent an attempt of developing a Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) procedure for ship design, involving the modeling, the development and the implementation of algorithms for the hydrodynamic optimization. For a modern naval surface combatant, a three objective functions problem is devised and solved in the framework of the MDO approach, and the final shape is manufactured and experimentally tested.