Feature 8 | CAD/CAM


Commercial applications for naval software package


Paramarine, a computer-aided design (CAD) soſtware package that was originally developed to help design warships and submarines is finding new applications in the commercial sector.


first released in 2000. Te company that developed it, GRC, acquired by QinetiQ Plc in March 2006 (becoming QinetiQ GRC in the process), recently released Version 7 (V7) of the product, and describes Paramarine as the world’s only ‘integrated’ naval architecture design and analysis product. One of the most important advantages


P


of Paramarine is that it compresses the early stages of the design process, reducing risk and cost, and improving understanding of a design. Its entry into the commercial ship and superyacht design market is also due to another important feature – compatibility with NX,


the CAD package developed by


Siemens, which is widely used throughout the marine industry. Te new functionality in V7 is intended


to further enhance the design process, with a focus on reducing cost and mitigating risk. Te new functionality further reduces design time and provides improved configuration control by allowing users to work concurrently on the same vessel. It also provides faster design analysis and documentation delivery, more efficient reporting, including automated design updates. NX and Paramarine are both based


around Parasolid, a geometric modelling ‘kernel,’ so transferring data between the two takes seconds to complete, without any loss of fidelity. Integration with NX allows Paramarine to ‘interrogate’ the 3D CAD geometry in it when conducting simple volumetric or more advanced stability analysis (in contrast to measurements based on simplified sectional data). Te benefit to end users is that naval


architectural analysis can be conducted much more quickly than would


Warship Technology March 2011


aramarine uses technology originally developed by the UK Ministry of Defence and was


Paramarine was originally developed for very complex projects such as warships


otherwise be the case, using the master geometry dataset in NX. As Mr Carter explained, the soſtware is already used by shipbuilders such as BAE Systems and BVT Surface Fleet in the UK, DCNS Ingenerie in France, Navantia in Spain, and Kockums in Sweden. It is also used by government authorities such as UK Ministry of Defence and the Defence Science & Technology Organisation in Australia, and by concept designers such as BMT and in academia by well-known universities. In recent months, Paramarine has


also begun to be used by leading naval architects in the


commercial ship


and superyacht sector, among them Ingenieurbüro Mühlhoff in Germany, and Bernard Olesinski Ltd in the UK. Ingenieurbüro Mühlhoff is a naval


architecture consultancy based in Germany serving mainland Europe, providing a range of services including manufacturing documents, strength calculations, development of building packages, construction supervision, intact and damaged stability analysis, stability submissions and consulting. Director Felix Mühlhoff explained that until recently his company had been using a soſtware stability analysis tool that was not integrated with NX. Tis caused issues during the design process, and led the


company to try to find a soſtware package that was integrated with NX that also had all of the functionality that Mr Mühlhoff required across a range of vessel types and levels of complexity. “I had used NX for a long time and it


was a major problem for me to share data between the CAD system and stability analysis software. In 2009 I identified Paramarine as being capable of this integration and, following extensive testing, adopted it to do all stability work,” Mr Mühlhoff explained. “Introducing the QinetiQ GRC soſtware immediately gave us a massive benefit in that it allowed us to integrate NX CAD data into Paramarine without any issues. This has had a significant impact on the time it takes to design a vessel, speeding up the whole process by up to 40%,” Mr Mühlhoff told Warship Technology. Another commercial designer now


using Paramarine is Bernard Olesinski Ltd, a leading designer of power boats and super yachts. Te company operates in a very competitive market in which the quality of design and the ability to innovate are key, as is delivering absolute accuracy during the design process and being able to verify and validate design approaches rapidly. “Integration of the multiple soſtware packages we use brings us significant


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