3534. Mass Properties Requirements For Marine Design Software

Paper

Abstract

Design tools have made significant progress since the days of drafting boards and T-squares. Today’s advanced 3-D product modeling systems offer tremendous capability in both design and analysis. However, the same capabilities that benefit the ship designer are usually not optimized for the mass properties engineer or weight calculator who must extract data from the product model to determine weights and moments for the marine product in question. In the marine field, the identification of functionality to support the mass properties function is developed each time a new design system is deployed and often gets much less attention than the design function. Because new design tools are usually not developed specifically for the marine industry, extensive customization including mass properties functionality is generally required for each marine application. No industry standard exists for the basic functional requirements which a new design tool should satisfy. This paper will attempt to define core functional requirements needed by mass properties engineers in the marine field. It is hoped that this effort will allow the mass properties engineer faced with the advent of a new design tool to dedicate more time in the future to the unique or specialized features desired rather than the core mass properties requirements that should be met by all advanced design tools.