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This paper describes an attempt of improving ship hull form, minimizing ship viscous resistance. The method adopted here represents the hull-from variation function using B-spline function, takes the coefficients of the B-spline as the design variables, and evaluates the viscous resistance value by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method, called NICE Code developed by Kodama. Then a feasible direction method is applied to the optimizing process including the above procedure of viscous resistance computation. It is found that the convergence of the iterative optimizing process is steady, and that the method is useful for practical initial design of ship forms, although it also leaves some aspects of improvement such as accuracy of the sensitivity coefficients.
