SENER Presents on History of Ship Design

The COMPIT annual edition took part this year from May 11-13 in Ulrichshusen, Germany, with the participation of SENER. This event is an International Conference on Computer Applications and Information Technology in the Maritime Industries that takes place every year in Europe.

As in the previous edition Rodrigo Pérez presented a paper, which this year was about “History and Evolution of Shipbuilding Oriented CAD Tools” written by Rodrigo Perez and Carlos Gonzalez, both from SENER.

The paper traces the history of ship design since Roman times, when ship designers began to use curves for drawing frames, through the Venetian techniques (XIII-XVI centuries) reusing templates, to the most modern methods for ship design with FORAN. FORAN, a shipbuilding CAD/CAM tool developed by SENER, offers a comprehensive process for the design and construction of ships, offshore platforms and submarines, with the aid of computers. It was conceived as an advanced engineering technique for improving the design and reducing the construction period of a vessel.

This paper traces the history of this CAD system, since its organization was differentiated into two stages: design (modules from F.1 to F.7) and production (F.8 to F.22); until the recent advances in integration with Product Lifecycle Managements (PLM) tools, Virtual Reality and the near future where all the ship product information will be accessible in electronic devices, allowing paper-less design.