A study on fiber glass composite hovercraft hull with different wall thickness using finite element analysis

Abstract

Now days, the usage of fibre reinforce has tremendously give benefit to a weight reduction and enhancing the performance of a product. The design and development of this project consist of the study of the material used for the hull design which is a composite material known as fibre glass reinforced plastic. The benchmarking of the hull design used a previous design from universal hovercraft whereby the previous design was made from marine grade plywood. Some development and innovative changes have been made to the hull design by inserting inner structures to strengthen the hull by using fibre glass material. This project will focus more on the analysis of the hull structure and construction using FRP composite. The analysis will use a 3D modeling data using CATIA and will be analyzed using CATIA /Abacus FEM method. Scale model will be done as an experimental study for the conceptual design and to study the overall hovercraft design. The result will be used in order to optimize the structure design of the hovercraft hull. In summary, from the project it shows that the composite is a unique material because the material properties are different from other standard material due to the ratio of the mixture between fiber and epoxy. The strength of material also changes due to the volume of the composite itself. In conclusion, from the result of the FEA analysis the composite hull shows that the increasing thickness of the structure will affect the weight of the hull. As a trade-off in designing the hull, the weight is important for the performance of the hovercraft. From the FEA analysis, the result also shows that displacement is more accurate than Von Mises Stress in FEA analysis. FEA analysis is a tool that can help in enhancing a product optimization and predict a failure for the designed part.