How Chip-Based Photonic Sensing Improves The Structural Design Of Ships
As a naval architect or engineer the validation of a ship's design can be challenging. How do you validate and improve it when each ship is unique?
Together with a well-recognized naval engineering company in the Netherlands, PhotonFirst accomplished breakthrough steps in optimizing the structural design of ships and yachts.
So, what it is exactly that we did?
On four different ships and yachts networks of optical fibers have been installed into the most crucial composite and steel structures.
Two types of installation have been used:
• Retrofit solutions, which work well when validating the load cases used in the FEA or FDA modelling of the design.
• And secondly integration of the fibers into the composite structures during the production process, which enable a more advanced way of validating how many layers composite are eventually required to reach the specified structural integrity.
The optical fibers are part of an advanced sensing system from PhotonFirst used to capture data from numerous sensor points throughout the entire ship. The technology is based on the latest innovation of chip-based photonics sensing solutions developed by PhotonFirst.
During sailing, the real-time data of several measurands like strain, temperature and vibration has been collected, processed and analysed by the naval engineering team. The findings eventually have been used to improve structural integrity of future designs, especially related to the hogging and sagging of the ships.
Besides this example, PhotonFirst has many more applications in the maritime industry. We are an official partner of the Technical University Delft HydroMotion Team, enabling them with the latest innovations in chip-based photonics sensing on their hydrogen powered boat design. For more information about this project, have a look at the video on our Youtube Channel.
Do you want to know more about our applications in the maritime industry? Or are you curious how we can help you? Contact us via [email protected]
www.photonfirst.com