Optimal dimension design of a hatch cover for lightening a bulk carrier

ABSTRACT: According to the increase of the operating cost and material cost of a ship due to the change of international oil price, a demand for the lightening of the ship weight is being made from various parties such as shipping companies, ship owners, and shipyards. To satisfy such demand, many studies for a light ship are being made. As one of them, an optimal design method of an existing hull structure, that is, a method for lightening the ship weight based on the optimization technique was proposed in this study. For this, we selected a hatch cover of a bulk carrier as an optimization target and formulated an optimization problem in order to determine optimal principal dimensions of the hatch cover for lightening the bulk carrier. Some dimensions representing the shape of the hatch cover were selected as design variables and some design considerations related to the maximum stress, maximum deflection, and geometry of the hatch cover were selected as constraints. In addition, the minimization of the weight of the hatch cover was selected as an objective function. To solve this optimization problem, we developed an optimization program based on the Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) using C++ programming language. To evaluate the applicability of the developed program, it was applied to a problem for finding optimal principal dimensions of the hatch cover of a deadweight 180,000 ton bulk carrier. The result shows that the developed program can decrease the hatch cover's weight by about 8.5%. Thus, this study will be able to contribute to make energy saving and environment-friendly ship in shipyard.