Concept Design Methodology to Enable Naval Smart Grid onboard Electric Ships

The design of naval electric ships is a complex task, requiring the combined effort of several experts to provide a feasible, efficient, and effective design. In this regard, modifying an existing “parent” design still seems to be the easiest way to achieve cost reduction, acquisition process anticipation, and reduced technical risks. In last decades, many methods have been proposed to approach new design concepts. In this paper the authors support the use of set-based design (SBD) paradigm, especially at concept design stage, with the aim of identifying the best possible design enabling naval smart grid onboard. A synthesis is made of the primary properties of a number of baseline ships, to ease the metamodeling of ships” attributes. The latter are used to drive a random mathematical design model in a MADM framework. A large set of feasible designs is generated by an adaptive Monte Carlo sampling, followed by identification of the Pareto frontier and selection of the best designs through a rank ordering. In this paper it is shown how the best non-dominated designs can improve performance, while providing a significant advantage compared with the baseline ships in terms of lower onboard occupied volumes and weight. The latter can then be used for installing additional equipment onboard the vessel, like energy storage systems, in order to enable the integration of modern and future electric systems. A preliminary assessment of the achievable energy storage capacity enabled by the SBD approach is also given, to allow evaluating the order of magnitude of the advantages provided by the SBD approach.