Altair > Case Studies > HyperWorks: Streamlining Boat Design and Engineering at Sea Ray

HyperWorks: Streamlining Boat Design and Engineering at Sea Ray

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Digital Twin / Simulation
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Middleware, SDKs & Libraries

Applicable Industries

Automotive
Marine & Shipping

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development

Use Cases

Structural Health Monitoring
Time Sensitive Networking

About The Customer

Sea Ray Boats is a leading U.S.-based manufacturer of high-end pleasure boats. The company is part of the Brunswick Boat Group, the world's largest maker of pleasure boats. Sea Ray is known for its handsome, high-performance boats and introduces eight to 12 new or refreshed designs every year. The company's engineering team is based at Merritt Island, near Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral on Florida's Space Coast. The team painstakingly creates and analyzes engineering designs for the boats using Altair HyperWorks CAE tools exclusively.

The Challenge

Sea Ray Boats, a leading U.S.-based manufacturer of high-end pleasure boats, is constantly challenged by the need for innovation and change in the luxury boat market. The company introduces eight to 12 new or refreshed designs every year, with the engineering team working on six or seven designs at any given time. The primary challenge in designing boats is creating usable space, which is always in short supply. Much of the design effort focuses on configurable space that can change function to fill more than one need. The design cycle varies with the boat, typically averaging eight to 18 months depending on the size and type of the boat. The engineering team at Sea Ray uses Altair HyperWorks CAE tools exclusively for the entire analysis process of the vessel, from modeling and simulation, to visualization and reporting.

The Solution

Sea Ray has expanded the use of HyperWorks to seven engineers, creating full-system CAE models of entire vessels and looking at designs under a variety of load conditions. The engineering team primarily uses HyperMesh and HyperView to create and assess its full-system structural models. They also use HyperGraph in the Structural Group and the Naval Engineering Group to plot speed, performance and G-loading from instrumented on-water testing. The Mechanical Engineering section recently began using MotionView to simulate the function of a number of mechanisms. Sea Ray relies solely on OptiStruct for structural analysis. The standard Sea Ray model analysis includes inertia relief and vibration simulations on an untrimmed vessel. Later on, point masses that represent the engine, batteries, generators and other non-structural components are added to the simulation model.

Operational Impact

The use of HyperWorks has enabled Sea Ray to build a library of full-system models, which helps to shorten the design cycle. The library now includes every boat size that Sea Ray builds. This allows the engineering team to conduct studies earlier in the design of a new model by making changes to an existing FEA model, such as moving bulkheads, changing room layouts, shifting weight and mass, and running analyses to see the effects on the boat's structure. The team is continually expanding its modeling and analysis capability using HyperWorks tools.