General about Handling of Profiles

The Hull structure of a ship is built up by in principle two types of basic material, plates (sheet material) and profiles (bars). Profiles are used to stiffen plates and for support, for example, pillars between decks.

However, plates may also be stiffened by "profiles" that are part of the plate itself, for example, folded flanges, swaging and corrugation (swaging is in AVEVA Marine the name of small, stiffener-like corrugation).

It might therefore be meaningful to talk about stiffeners of two categories: those made of profiles and those that are part of the plate. The partition into sheet material and bar material is also made less clean by the fact that even if many profiles are fabricated from bars others consist of assembled strips of plates.

The question about the actual profile standard used in AVEVA Marine is dealt with in a document of its own. There are also documents describing other more specialized features of the profile handling, for example, how parts generated as profiles may be converted into and manufactured as plate parts.

However, the focus of this document is on how profiles are handled from a modelling point of view, that means, how different types of stiffening can be generated in Hull.

From a modelling point of view profiles can be divided into shell profiles and plane panel profiles.