Parametric Generation of Planing Hulls with NURBS Surfaces

This article presents a mathematical method for producing hard-chine ship hulls based on a set of numerical parameters that are directly related to the geometric features of the hull and uniquely define a hull form for this type of ship. The term planing hull is used generically to describe the majority of hard-chine boats being built today. This article is focused on unstepped, single-chine hulls. B-spline curves and surfaces were combined with constraints on the significant ship curves to produce the final hull design. The hard-chine hull geometry was modeled by decomposing the surface geometry into boundary curves, which were defined by design constraints or parameters. In planing hull design, these control curves are the center, chine, and sheer lines as well as their geometric features including position, slope, and, in the case of the chine, enclosed area and centroid. These geometric parameters have physical, hydrodynamic, and stability implications from the design point of view. The proposed method uses two-dimensional orthogonal projections of the control curves and then produces three-dimensional (3-D) definitions using B-spline fitting of the 3-D data points. The fitting considers maximum deviation from the curve to the data points and is based on an original selection of the parameterization. A net of B-spline curves (stations) is then created to match the previously defined 3-D boundaries. A final set of lofting surfaces of the previous B-spline curves produces the hull surface.