The Network Block Approach Applied to the Initial Design of Submarine Distributed Ship Service Systems

The paper follows on from a recent IJME paper and summarises a new early stage ship design approach. This is termed the Network Block approach and merges the advantages of the UCL 3D physically based ship synthesis Design Building Block (DBB) approach and the Virginia Tech originated Architecture Flow Optimisation (AFO) method for distributed ship service systems (DS3). The approach has been applied to submarine DS3 design and utilises Qinetiq’s Paramarine CASD suite features and various frameworks. The proposed Network Block approach enables the development of a submarine concept design to different levels of granularities. These range from modelling individual spaces to locating various DS3 components and routings. The proposed approach also enables the designer to balance the energy demands of a set of distributed systems. This is done by performing a steady-state flow simulation and visualising the complexity of the submarine DS3 in a 3D multiplex network configuration. The potential benefits and limitations from such a 3D based physical and network synthesis are presented. The paper concludes with a discussion of the Network Block approach comparing it to previous applications of network theory which have been to surface ship design. It concludes that it would be possible to better estimate DS3 weight and space inputs to early stage submarine design and also enable radical submarine configurations and DS3 options to be reflected in early stage submarine design for better concept exploration and requirement elucidation. Finally, further work on the sensitivity of the approach to designer inputs will be addressed in future papers.