An Efficient Combined-Deformation Algorithm for 3D STL Ship Hulls

Stereolithography files are very popular because of their simple mesh format. In ship hull design, modelling and optimizing, however, a considerable amount of meshes are usually required to approach the faired surface and curves, significantly increasing the computational cost of hull form deformation. Instead of calculating the target displacement of every section ΔX_i on a high-quality ship hull model, this research applied the Fast Quadric Mesh Simplification algorithm to reduce the number of meshes within acceptable hydrostatics error and then calculate ΔX_i with much less computational cost. The results indicate that the time cost could be reduced by 79.62% compared to the traditional method.