VELOCITY OVER THE TARGET SURFACE AND PRESSURE FOR A NUMERIC GEOMETRY OPTIMIZATION OF AN WED

The pressure on ships designers to achieve both reduced fuel costs and reduced emissions by optimizing the hull and propeller has never been higher. Being one of the key strategic business goals for ship owners and operators, the reduction of fuel cost becomes essential; and furthermore a variety of recent legislations require owners and operators to move towards the reduction of emissions from ships of SOx, NOx and CO. There has been great interest in the potential to enhance the performance of existing vessels through retrofit of devices to the hull, in parallel to the performance improvement of new built vessels. The Wake Equalizing Duct (WED) device must be customized to fit to the afterbody of the ship in terms of performing its supposed function as Velocity over the Target Surface and Pressure. The Designer is therefore placed in the front of multiple geometric solutions from between he has to make a choice. A given geometry of a WED device is taken and via Design Optimization the geometry of the duct was refined so that better results are achieved with a smaller and more compact WED. A rational choosing approach by involving the numeric optimization of the geometry of the WED in order to select the best fitted WED to perform the best in order to achieve some predefined parameters is targeted in this papers.