| Summary: | Dr. Akinturk showed that the design process of a small craft can be computerized, and new
design nodes, such as crew safety or acceleration levels can be included in the preliminary
design. This study goes one step further by directly including ergonomic criteria in the
preliminary ship design process. In addition, the design platform selected, is an easily
available one. It is shown that an integrated technical computing environment such as Matlab,
can do the' preliminary small craft design with the inclusion of ergonomic criteria. This
demonstrates also that the methodology developed in this study can be implemented and
extended easily by others. The design process used in this study will be referred as "Matship".
The ergonomic criteria, implemented in Matship, include constraints on RMS motion
amplitudes and accelerations, peak motion responses and ergonomic criteria that relate
maintaining one's balance onboard of a ship to ship motions. In the last one, an empirical
relation, developed by Kimura, is used between the first moments of the spectra of vertical
and longitudinal accelerations on the deck and human balance. The study shows the effect of
human factors on the principle dimensions of the boats and their operational speed.
The preliminary results reported in this thesis show that seakeeping ergonomic criteria can be
implemented explicitly into the preliminary design of a small craft, for crew safety and
passenger comfort. This thesis presents a methodology to include seakeeping ergonomic
criteria in the preliminary design process and discusses its effects on the design parameters
such as principal dimensions, power requirement, cost etc. The effects of these criteria on the
final design can be quantified in terms of principal dimensions or monetary terms. Matship
presents a methodology to include ergonomic criteria in the preliminary design and discusses
their effects on the ship parameters. This study suggests that length restriction imposed on
fishing vessels in Canada and elsewhere may cause unnecessary risk to crew of smaller
vessels and should be further studied. The Matlab files used in this study are available at
University of British Columbia's (UBC) Mechanical Engineering web site,
http://www.mech.ubc.ca/.
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