In shipbuilding, diverse manufacturing techniques for automation have been developed and used in practice. Among them, however, the hull forming automation is the one that has not been of major concern compared with others such as welding and cutting. The basis of the development of this process is to find out how to extract thermal forming information. There exist various methods to obtain such information and the 3D design shape that needs to be formed should be extracted first for getting the necessary thermal forming information. Except well-established shipyards which operate 3D design systems, most of the shipyards only rely on 2.5D design systems and do not have an easy way to obtain 3D surface design data. So in this study, various shipbuilding design systems used by shipyards are investigated and a 3D design surface data extraction method is proposed from those design systems. Then an example is presented to show the extraction of real 3D surface data using the proposed method and computation of thermal forming information using the data.

Recently, there has been a serious effort to design a wing in ground effect (WIG) craft. Vehicles of this type might use low aspect ratio wings defined as those with smaller than 3. Design and prediction techniques for fixed wings of relatively large aspect ratio are reasonably well developed. However, Aerodynamic problems related to vortex lift on wings of low aspect ratio have made it difficult to use existing techniques. In this work, we firstly focus on understanding aerodynamic characteristics of low aspect ratio wings and comparing the results from experimental measurements and currently available numerical predictions for both inviscid and viscous flows. Second, we apply an improved numerical method, "B-spline based high panel method with wake roll-up modeling", to the same problem.

Recognition of real time locations of crews for a naval ship is important, not only for the operation efficiency but also for the safety of onboard crews in the ship. More than 100 crews are dwelling in a modem naval ship and they are involved in various duties. Moreover many visitors come in and out frequently while the ship is moored in a harbor. It sometimes requires considerable time and efforts to find a person for urgent mission. It would enhance the operational efficiency if locations of onboard crews are recognized and monitored in real time. An active type RFID tag, which has a specific ID number, is distributed to each crew member, which should be carried during his stay in the ship. A number of fixed type RFID readers are to be located at the major passages of the ship, which are connected to the main computer via Local Area Network. The location of a crew would be identified by the ID number of his RFID tag and the location of the RFID reader which detected the RFID tag. A middleware is needed to process the collected data in the main computer. The data is fed to application softwares, which actually display locations of the concerned crews. The software is coded using GUI (Graphic User Interface) for better user friendliness, which has the function of storing the location history of a crew, and sending warning messages to appropriate persons, if unallowable behavior is detected. An auxiliary naval ship is selected for an experimental application study of the proposed system. It turns out that the required budget and time for the realization of the system is within the allowable limits. But complementary measures to protect the privacy of onboard crews should be considered and adopted, before the application of the system is realized.

A jet stream applied tangential to a curved surface in fluid increases lift force by strengthening circulation around the surface and this phenomenon is known as the Coanda effect. Many experimental and numerical studies have been performed on the Coanda effect and the results found to be useful in various fields of aerodynamics. Recently, preliminary studies on Coanda control surface are in progress to look for practical application in marine hydrodynamics since various control surfaces are used to control behaviors of ships and offshore structures. In the present study, the performance of a Coanda control surface with different geometries of the jet injection nozzle was surveyed to assess applicability to ship rudders. A numerical simulation was carried out to study flow characteristics around a section of a horn type rudder subjected to a tangential jet stream. The RANS equations, discretized by a cell-centered finite volume method were used for this computation after verification by comparing to the experimental data available. Special attentions have been given to the sensitivity of the lift performance of a Coanda rudder to the location of the slit (outlet) and intake of the gap between the horn and rudder surface at the various angles of attack. It is found that the location of the water intake is important in enhancing the lift because the gap functions as a conduit of nozzle generating a jet sheet on the rudder surface.