SBIR-STTR Award

Decisions made at concept design have profound impacts on total life cycle cost. The industry trend is to apply automated software tools during concept design so larger numbers of alternatives can be evaluated and optimal, feasible solutions identified. Current ship concept design software tools have many capabilities, but lack the ability to synthesize physical layouts for shipboard distribution systems. Without fully sized and located distribution system models, it is not possible to fully validate the feasibility of the concept design and accurately estimate cost, weight, survivability, and other performance parameters. The problem is acute for ship cooling distribution systems because integrated electrical power systems and high-energy defense/combat weapons systems planned for future ships will require nearly an order of magnitude more thermal management. Anchor Technology Inc. has developed innovative technology which solves this problem, automatically synthesizing and routing distribution networks. A major US and international ship design tool capability gap exists. This gap can be eliminated by creating software tools to automatically generate detailed 3D models of ship distribution systems during concept design. The new technology will reduce costs associated with concept, preliminary and detail ship design, as well as total lifecycle costs.

Benefit:
Benefits to the Navy include (1) reducing the time from early requirements identification to delivery of a ship by automating one portion of each of the stages of design, (2) enabling delivery of ships that have lower total cost of ownership by enabling global optimization tools to be fully employed in concept design, (3) reducing the total cost and schedule time for preliminary, contract and detail design by employing automation for the design of distribution systems, (4) compensating for the shortage of skilled ship system engineers and designers by capturing and automating rules of design for distribution systems. Estimated cost savings to the Navy are $500,000/year for full deployment of this technology in concept design, $1,500,000/year for deployment in preliminary and contract design, and $4,000,000/year for deployment in detail design. Similar benefits will apply to the much larger commercial ship design field. The potentials for additional benefits exist in the commercial land-based facility and process plant design fields as well.

Keywords:
distribution systems, distribution systems, HVAC, network synthesis, 3d routing, Design Automation, piping, Ship design, fluid flow analysis

Decisions made at concept design have profound impacts on total life cycle cost. The industry trend is to apply automated software tools during concept design so larger numbers of alternatives can be evaluated and optimal, feasible solutions identified. Current ship concept design software tools lack the ability to synthesize physical layouts for shipboard distribution systems. Without sized and located distribution system models, it is not possible to fully validate the feasibility of the concept design and accurately estimate cost, weight, survivability, and other performance parameters. The problem is acute for ship cooling distribution systems because integrated electrical power systems and high-energy defense/combat weapons systems planned for future ships will require several times more thermal management. This gap can be eliminated by creating software tools to automatically generate detailed 3D models of ship distribution systems during concept design. Anchor Technology Inc. has developed innovative technology which can solve this problem, directly synthesizing, routing and analyzing distribution networks. The new technology will reduce costs associated with concept, preliminary and detail ship design, as well as total lifecycle costs. This project will develop an advanced prototype implementation of the technology and demonstrate it on a representative medium sized ship design.

Benefit:
Benefits to the Navy include (1) reducing the time from early requirements identification to delivery of a ship by automating one portion of each of the stages of design, (2) enabling delivery of ships that have lower total cost of ownership by enabling global optimization tools to be fully employed in concept design, (3) reducing the total cost and schedule time for preliminary, contract and detail design by employing automation for the design of distribution systems, (4) compensating for the shortage of skilled ship system engineers and designers by capturing and automating rules of design for distribution systems. Estimated cost savings to the Navy are $500,000/year for full deployment of this technology in concept design, $1,500,000/year for deployment in preliminary and contract design, and $4,000,000/year for deployment in detail design. Commercial ship design will benefit from the tools being developed in this project. This technology is directly applicable to the much larger architecture, engineering, and construction fields.

Keywords:
Design Automation, Ship design, fluid flow analysis, 3d routing, piping, network synthesis, HVAC, distribution systems