Chapter 8: Effects of Low and High Fidelity Solvers on Hull form Optimization, In: Assessing the Ability to Optimize Hull Forms of Sea Vehicles for Best Performance in Sea Environment

This chapter investigates on the effects of the hydrodynamic solver on the multi-objective hull-form optimization of the DTMB 5415 model in calm water. Potential flow and Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) solvers are compared. The former is formulated and implemented using two linearization approaches (Kelvin and Dawson), combined with two methods for the wave resistance. The Pareto fronts for the reduction of the resistance at two speeds are obtained by a multi-objective deterministic particle swarm optimization and are significantly affected by the potential flow formulation. A correlation analysis with RANS is shown, in order to suggest the most effective potential flow formulation for the present case. Finally, a RANS-based metamodel is used for a single-objective optimization, for the calm water resistance at Fr=0.25, using global and global/local hybrid optimization algorithms.