Fairway
Fairway is software for design, fairing, manipulation of ship hull forms and conversions of models from other design software. Fairway is a module of PIAS, SARC’s suite of naval architectural software.
How does Fairway work?
Using Fairway is much like drafting a lines plan on paper, only better. Fairway offers:
- The hull surface is shaped by manipulating lines that lie on the hull surface. The `gaps’ between the lines are filled with curved surfaces, which are automatically generated on the basis of the shapes of the neighbouring lines.
- Full control over line geometry, via coordinates of points, tangents, line types, etc.
- Including fairing options, which mimic the use of a physical spline or batten, with user-defined accuracy and spline stiffness.
- Changes in line geometry are automatically processed in connected lines.
- New lines can be generated by the push of a button.
- Newly developed (2013) GUI, offering mixed graphical and alphanumerical operations, and integrated surface rendering PIAS calculations are presented in comprehensive reports
Why is Fairway better than NURBS surface modelers?
- Fairway offers direct control over hull coordinates, as opposed to indirect control via ‘network control points’, ‘vertices’, ‘nodes’, ‘master lines’ and other phenomena associated with NURBS surfaces.
- Ship hulls generally require an irregular network of lines to describe them: it will take multiple NURBS surfaces to model even the simplest of ships. Thus, the designer is burdened with manipulation, selection and modification of multiple separate surfaces. In Fairway, the network is just a result of the design process, not the governing principle
What is Fairway used for?
- Hull form design, starting from scratch, or on basic of an existing hull form.
- Design modification at any design stage with integrated hydrostatics or stability analyses.
- Hull form transformation and scaling.
- Hull design guided by a sectional area curve, to meet required hull parameters.
- Completion of partial lines plans.
- Shell plate expansions of developable and double curved plates including templates.
- Manipulations on multiple solids for hull, superstructures, bow thrusters, etc.
- Fairing with user-defined accuracy, up to and beyond production tolerances.
- Export of hull form data to PIAS, NUPAS, Rhinoceros, MasterShip, Finite Element and CFD software, DXF, IGES, VRML, tables of offsets, etc.
- Generation of lines plans and tactile scale models (Rapid Prototyping and 3D printing).
- Import of DXF wire frame models or IGES NURBS surface models.
- Import and further processing of full-scale ship shape measurement by means of photogrammetry.
