LUXURY YACHT

Shipyard

VanDerHeijden Steelyachts, The Netherlands

Project Highlights

VanDerHeijden Steelyachts is a small shipyard from the Netherlands specialising in the construction of luxury steel yachts. Founded in 1993, the yard has delivered over 200 yachts from a range of standard hull series designed by external designers. In recent years, an increasing number of prospective customers have been requesting custom design hulls, and so VDH made the decision to introduce an in-house design department and implement the Maxsurf suite for vessel design and ShipConstructor for vessel detailing. Not only does this enable the yard to sell into a bigger market, it also creates the opportunity to change over to more efficient building practices and increase product quality.

The in-house design department at VanDerHeijden works in close cooperation with the skilled craftsmen on the floor to adjust the design to ensure ease of construction. The naval architect at VanDerHeijden, John van Leuwen, saw the potential of integrating the applications in the Maxsurf suite with ShipConstructor to improve the construction practices of the yard. For example, more accurate cut paths for developed plates and accurate stiffener paths and cutouts have enabled VanDerHeijden to adopt a more efficient production method and eliminate time consuming bending and fitting practices.

Maxsurf’s developable surface function is used to accurately model the hull so that it can be built from 100% developable plate. Workshop is used to develop the plate and calculate any regions where strain occurs. The plate parts are exported to ShipConstructor from where they are detailed and nested. The nests are then exported to NC files, which can be directly sent to the plasma cutting machine at VanDerHeijden. A high degree of developability of the hull plates allows VanDerHeijden to save cost on plate forming equipment and production resources. The Maxsurf/ShipConstructor combination helps them deliver highly accurate work packages to the shop floor, ready for assembly and with an absolute minimum of rework.

Recently VanDerHeijden started construction of a newly designed yacht with a flared bow. The plates in the bow region are divided up in such way that the strain in each of the plates is within the yard’s practical bending limits.

Maxsurf and ShipConstructor have allowed VanDerHeijden to completely review their building process; the existing practice was to start with the keel and hull plate and then, using a trial and error method, bend the transverse stiffeners and fit them to the hull plate. After introducing Maxsurf and ShipConstructor, VanDerHeijden is now able to reverse the building process; frames and longitudinals first, and then simply fold the hull plates along the framework. With this approach, parts no longer require any bending. This saves a significant amount of time and is made possible by highly accurate production information directly derived from the 3D model.

The implementation of Maxsurf and ShipConstructor at VanDerHeijden went extremely smoothly, where the first vessel was built with considerably less effort than in the past. Even though the staff at VanDerHeijden were extremely skilled in the existing practice before adopting Maxsurf and ShipConstructor, the change in production method resulted in a reduction of 20-25% steelwork time, a saving of up to 100 man-hours per yacht, enabling VanDerHeijden to deliver 2 extra vessels per year at a very competitive price.

VanDerHeijden Steelyachts is supported by Marinus Meijers, SSI’s ShipConstructor representative in The Netherlands.