DEVELOPING A PROTOTYPE CONCURRENT DESIGN TOOL FOR COMPOSITE TOPSIDE STRUCTURES

A prototype concurrent engineering tool has been developed for the pre liminary design of composite topside structures for modern navy warshi ps. This tool, named GELS for the Concurrent Engineering of Layered St ructures, provides designers with an immediate assessment of the impac ts of their decisions on several disciplines which are important to th e performance of a modern naval topside structure, including electroma gnetic interference effects (EMI), radar cross section (RCS), structur al integrity, cost, and weight. Preliminary analysis modules in each o f these disciplines are integrated to operate from a common set of des ign variables and a common materials database. Performance in each dis cipline and an overall fitness function for the concept are then evalu ated. A graphical user interface (GUI) is used to define requirements and to display the results from the technical analysis modules. Optimi zation techniques, including feasible sequential quadratic programming (FSQP) and exhaustive search are used to modify the design variables to satisfy all requirements simultaneously. The development of this to ol, the technical modules, and their integration are discussed noting the decisions and compromises required to develop and integrate the mo dules into a prototype conceptual design tool.