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Executive summary

Ingenieurbüro Mühlhoff – a Germany-based naval architecture consultancy company serving mainland Europe – required a fully-integrated software stability analysis tool. QinetiQ developed Paramarine®, one of the world’s only fully-integrated Naval Architecture Design and Analysis products.

The brief

Ingenieurbüro Mühlhoff provides services for the design of a wide range of vessels, including complete designs of superyachts, river boats and passenger ships. The company has been operating for more than 15 years, delivering a variety of services including:

• Manufacturing documents
• Strength calculations
• Development of building packages
• Construction supervision
• Intact and damaged stability analysis
• Ships stability submissions
• Consulting

Until 2009, Ingenieurbüro Mühlhoff had been using a software stability analysis tool that was not integrated with Siemens NX, the company’s preferred CAD tool. This caused issues during the design process, so a search began to find a software package that was integrated with Siemens NX and that also had all the functionality that Ingenieurbüro Mühlhoff required across a broad spectrum of vessel types and levels of complexity.

“Introducing Paramarine® immediately gave us a massive benefit in that it allowed us to integrate our NX CAD data into Paramarine® without any issues. This has had a significant impact on the time it takes to design a boat, speeding up the whole process by as much as 40%.”
- Felix Mühlhoff, Founder and Owner, Ingenieurbüro Mühlhoff

Our solution

QinetiQ developed Paramarine®, one of the world’s only fully-integrated Naval Architecture Design and Analysis products that can handle the complexities of ship and submarine design. Paramarine® is based on 20 years’ experience in advanced marine design. Thousands of concept vessels have been modelled and their stability analysed using Paramarine®. It is used by many of the world’s leading shipbuilders, as well as many leading universities around the globe, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University College London.

Paramarine® was the perfect integrated solution for Felix Mühlhoff’s business, combining easily with the existing software because it uses the same geometric modelling kernel, Parasolid. This integration allows Paramarine® to interrogate the highly accurate 3D CAD geometry when conducting simple volumetric or more advanced stability analysis, in contrast to measurements based on simplified sectional data.

Paramarine® delivers:

• extensive and comprehensive early stage design capabilities
• integration with leading CAD packages, such as NX, to deal with all levels of complexity
• powerful real-time reporting, capable of converting into a range of formats for regulatory review
• a high degree of in-use flexibility, giving users total control, full compliance with all relevant commercial yacht-building regulations, and an extensive range of stability criteria
• ease of installation and use
• support from a wide range of consulting services
• fast manipulation and calculation of data
• a quicker design process

Paramarine® is one of the world’s only fully-integrated Naval Architecture Design and Analysis products that can handle the complexities of ship and submarine design.

Outcomes and benefits

The implementation of Paramarine® has provided a great deal of scope and flexibility, allowing Ingenieurbüro Mühlhoff to deal with the most complex requirements its numerous clients from across Europe might have. Another key benefit of Paramarine® is its ability to produce reports as and when required. Using Paramarine®, naval architects are able to easily and rapidly create reports to Excel that can be customised in a format to meet regulatory requirements.

Paramarine® has been built on the back of QinetiQ’s 20-plus years’ experience in naval architecture and is capable of dealing with the most complex designs and engineering requirements.

For more information contact: customercontact1@QinetiQ.com.