First Step Towards the Co-Design of Planing Craft and Active Control Systems

This paper takes a novel approach to the design of planing craft with active control systems (ACS) by co-designing the longitudinal center of gravity (lcg) and ACS, and compares its performance with a vessel where the lcg and ACS are designed sequentially (traditional approach). The vessels investigated are prismatic in shape. The ACS are modeled as forces on the vessel. The ACS controller is a Linear Quadratic Regulator designed using a reduced order model of the vessel. In the design, only the calm water drag is optimized. The simulated co-designed vessel had 10% lower calm water and mean seaway drag than the sequentially designed vessel. However, the co-designed vessel’s seakeeping was poorer — vertical acceleration doses 25% higher. Results indicate that the traditional sequential design approach does not fully exploit the synergy between a planing craft and its ACS; as a first step, the stability constraints should be relaxed in the design exploration.