NAPA Release 2019.2

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About NAPA Release 2019.2

Welcome to the launch of the second NAPA Release of 2019, we’re excited by the potential applications for all the tools we’ve created and updated since NAPA Release 2019.1.

Our team of engineers and developers has been working hard to identify, investigate, and improve the software that you use every day.

This release gives you more powerful tools for hull form modelling and loading condition balancing, as well as important updates for intact stability criteria, and six brand new structural design tools.

Here’s an overview of what’s new:

NAPA for Hull Form Design

The upgrade of NAPA’s Hull Form Modelling tools began in early 2018, and over the last 18 months, we’ve been continuously releasing new tools into the NAPA Designer Modelling workspace.

We are pleased to confirm that in test comparisons benchmarked against earlier versions of NAPA, we’ve found that modelling work in this version has become significantly faster.

In this release, there are five new features to improve your modelling:

• Improved snap settings for interactive modelling to quickly and intuitively build the hull form’s curve grid
• Enhanced interactive creation of 2D curves provides a more natural method to add curves
• Enhanced management of the topology enables more efficient management of your models
• The curve fairing tool (beta version) facilitates surface smoothing
• The triangular meshing of hull surface and export in STL (beta version) enables geometry exchange to external CFD software from NAPA

NAPA for Stability Analysis

Second Generation Intact Stability Criteria

In February this year, the IMO Sub-Committee on Ship Design and Construction (SDC) 6 meeting second-generation updated the intact stability criteria draft.

SDC has been working on second generation intact stability criteria since 2002, making good progress in many different areas. These include:

– The specification of direct stability assessment
– the preparation and approval of operational limitations and operational guidance
– vulnerability criteria for all five stability failure modes: pure loss of stability; parametric roll; surf-riding/broaching; dead ship condition; and excessive accelerations.

As the vulnerability criteria is considered to be finalized pending editorial changes, NAPA has now updated its software to account for the second-generation intact stability criteria as listed in the latest regulation drafts outlined in the document IMO SDC.6-WP.6 Annex 3.

The correspondence group will complete its work on the second generation of intact stability criteria at SDC 7 in 2020, and it will then be submitted to IMO’s Maritime Safety Committee (MSC).

Loading Conditions Balancing Tool

Historically, once a new lightweight has been calculated, designers have needed to undertake time-consuming manual re-balancing of the loading conditions to match with target displacement, trim, and draught, to take three examples.

To avoid this intensive manual process, NAPA has developed the Loading Conditions Balancing tool to automate the process. This updated version allows for substantially quicker re-balancing of a large number of loading conditions, and also provides a more extensive set of features.

NAPA for Structural Design

At this year’s User Meeting in Helsinki, we heard from many of the 400 user organizations that use NAPA for design applications. One of the most consistent elements of the feedback we received was from our partners who were looking to enhance what they could achieve in structural design and plan approval. These updates will make structural design and plan approval much more intuitive and efficient in modelling functions, finite element (FE) meshing, and drafting functionality.

There are also six new additional features:

• The interactive operational performance of NAPA Designer is improved with shorter response times to make your workflow more fluently and efficiently when modelling.
• New snapping functions with center point, tangent, and perpendicular snapping will increase the accuracy of your interactive work.
• New trimming functions will speed up your design process by making the geometry creation more intuitive.
• The stiffener landing tool now has better visualization options for normal surface control. This will give you better control of stiffener landing with complex layouts in curved shell structures.
• FEM automatic meshing in NAPA Designer now has more advanced options for mesh control. This delivers easy interactive access to many of those controls in FEM, which were previously only available with more complex commands and scripts.
• FEM in NAPA Designer now also supports the DNV GL Sesam export format. This format is used by DNV GL’s Genie software and it completes the wide-ranging number of export formats supported in NAPA Designer FEM.

NAPA Release 2019.2 installation packages (NAPA, NAPA Designer, and NAPA Drafting) are now available for downloading in the NAPA Customers’ web service. To access the service, it is required to login with the personal username and password.

Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact NAPA Customer Service.