Integrated Ship Electrical Design

摘要

Electrical Design is an increasingly important activity in today's Ship Design practice. The demand of the market for specialized types of ships, and the evolution of the on board equipment towards more sophisticated technologies has become a challenge for ship designers, where integration is envisaged as a major factor. This paper describes the advantages of the integration of Electrical Design tools into the environment of a commercial Ship Design and Production CAD suite. The electrical application described here intends to cover the most relevant aspects in design and production of electrical systems on ships. In particular, it includes facilities to create several types of electrical diagrams, model cableways, route cables automatically or manually, manage cable terminations, and instrumentation and control signals, as well as functions to create and administrate the electrical materials database and keep track of them along the project lifecycle Fully integrated in the CAD suite environment, supported by its 2D and 3D graphic capabilities, and working on the same relational database, it provides an efficient connection between the electrical department and the other disciplines in the shipyard design office. This Electrical Design package features a straightforward way to define all the data of an electrical project, avoiding redundancies and repetitive data input. As a consequence, a significant reduction of the design and production errors and working hours may be achieved.