MINIMUM WEIGHT DESIGN OF SUBMERSIBLE PRESSURE HULL UNDER HYDROSTATIC-PRESSURE

In this study, we proposed a minimum weight design of a submarine pres sure hull under hydrostatic pressure with constraints on factors such as general instability, buckling of shell between frames, plate yieldi ng, and frame yielding. A typical submarine pressure hull is also adop ted for a prototype model. This design problem is not only formulated as a discrete nonlinear, nondifferentiable, multimodal constrained min imization problem, but also solved by using the backtrack programming method. Results in this study indicate that the solution for the optim al model's weight reduces an average 6.65% more than the prototype mod el. The process in this study is favorable for the submersible pressur e hull design process. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.