FreeCAD News

Pret­ty much every­day some­one some­where is doing some­thing spec­tac­u­lar with FreeCAD! 

Spot­ted last week over on the FreeCAD forum Blue­Hori­zon post­ed about a proof of con­cept project to mod­el a boat hull and then per­form a hydro­sta­t­ic and sta­bil­i­ty analy­sis to work out how well the design performs. 

The project began cre­at­ing a mod­el of the hull sec­tion of the tar­get ves­sel. This was achieved by a com­bi­na­tion of sketch­es, B‑splines and sur­faces. With the sur­faces con­struct­ed, they then con­vert­ed the object to a com­pound and, in turn, into a solid. 

With the hull geom­e­try now com­plete the analy­sis was per­formed in the Python con­sole run­ning numer­ous Python scripts. We can’t claim we under­stand the out­put par­tic­u­lar­ly but read­ing gen­er­al­ly about ship hydro­sta­t­ic and sta­bil­i­ty analy­sis it’s incred­i­bly use­ful to see how a hull reacts in dif­fer­ent con­di­tions, but also impor­tant in terms of design­ing thrust and dri­ve sys­tems that can pro­vide ade­quate amounts of actu­a­tion for the ves­sel. Blue­Hori­zon has post­ed the full code exam­ples over on the forum post and the analy­sis uses the NumPy library with the results plot­ted using the Matplotlib. 

If you are inter­est­ed in delv­ing deep­er into this project do check out the forum post, also if you are inter­est­ed in boat design there is also the Ship work­bench add on which can be explored. We look for­ward to see­ing the first ves­sel afloat designed in FreeCAD!