Part 2
Basic Hydrostatics
Orca3D’s Basic Hydrostatics and Stability analysis offers a streamlined and efficient way to calculate the hydrostatics and stability of vessels using fixed loads or float planes. This tool’s simplicity and quick setup make it invaluable during the design process, allowing for immediate stability assessments. The model requirements are very forgiving, without the need for a closed model. Analyze monohulls, multihulls, or any floating structure with ease and accuracy.
Moreover, Orca3D’s capability to model fluid loads, such as water in ballast tanks, with its Advanced Stability module, underscores its comprehensive utility in marine design. These features, combined with user-friendly guidelines for model creation and visualization tools for ensuring accurate geometry orientation, make Orca3D an essential asset for naval architects and marine engineers. This integration of ease-of-use with advanced functionality ensures precise and reliable stability analyses all within the Rhino environment, fostering innovation and accuracy in vessel design.
Basic Hydrostatics – Custom Conditions
Custom Conditions is a powerful feature that enhances the flexibility of Orca3D’s Basic Hydrostatics and Stability Analysis.
Orca3D allows the user to specify a range of conditions by either specifying a range of flotation planes or a range of weights and CGs (free float condition). But sometimes you want to evaluate a list of conditions that include both. The Custom Condition feature allows you to define a list of conditions that will be computed and reported at the same time, combining any number of fixed plane and free float conditions. Users can name, disable, or modify conditions directly within the interface or through Excel for bulk edits. This customization ensures that analyses are both comprehensive and efficient, focusing on the most critical aspects of vessel stability.
Orca3D Sections (Version 3)
Orca3D’s section capabilities are a crucial tool for naval architects and designers, providing a dynamic and comprehensive way to visualize and modify hull designs. By computing sections through the hull in Rhino’s model space, users can assess the shape and fairness in real time, because any adjustments to the hull are immediately reflected in the sections. Additionally, sections enable specific hydrostatic calculations such as sectional area curves and prismatic coefficients, and are used to generate a traditional lines plan and offset table.
The Section Manager in Orca3D offers versatile options for defining and organizing sections, including the ability to handle different geometries and create multiple independent section lists. This flexibility enhances the precision and efficiency of the design process, making Orca’s section capabilities indispensable for producing robust and reliable vessel designs.
Orca3D Hull Assistant
The Hull Assistant feature in Orca3D is a powerful and essential tool for streamlined hull design. By offering tailored assistants for various hull types, it allows users to create and modify hull designs with ease and precision. Users can save and access their custom hull configurations, facilitating a more efficient design process.
Additionally, the ability to preview hulls with iso curves and evenly spaced sections, together with real-time hydrostatic values, provides an intuitive understanding of how various parameters affect the hull design. The feature to export and import hull settings further enhances collaboration and sharing among users. Overall, the Hull Assistant in Orca3D significantly simplifies the complex process of initiating a hull design, making it accessible and efficient for naval architects and marine engineers.
Orca3D Outward Normals
Understanding and correctly setting the outward normal direction of a surface in Rhino is crucial for accurate hydrostatic calculations in Orca3D. Each surface has an inside and an outside, indicated by outward normal arrows. If these arrows point incorrectly, it can lead to significant errors in buoyant volume calculations, as surfaces with outward normals pointing into the water contribute positively to buoyancy, while those pointing inside the hull deduct from it. This distinction is vital for ensuring precise hydrostatic properties, which are fundamental in naval architecture and marine engineering. By using the direction analysis tool and visual cues like backface coloring, designers can quickly verify and correct the orientation of all surfaces in a model, ensuring the integrity of hydrostatic computations and overall vessel performance.
Weight & Cost Tracking
Orca3D’s weight and cost tracking offers the ability to assign user-defined materials to the objects in your library. These materials are defined with a weight density and optionally a material cost density and labor cost density. These densities are defined as weight per unit length for curves, weight per unit area for surfaces, weight per unit volume for solids, and simply weight for points. Cost densities are defined in a similar manner. The user applies these materials to objects in the model, and Orca3D computes the total weight, center of gravity, and optionally the material and labor costs. A complete report may be generated and exported to various formats, including PDF and Excel. The weight and CG may be used as input to Orca3D’s Basic Hydrostatics and Stability feature.
