Abstract
Biodynamic response of shipboard crew to underwater shock is of a major concern to navies. An underwater shock can produce very high accelerations, resulting in severe human injuries aboard a battleship. Protection of human bodies from underwater shock is implemented by installing onboard isolators. In this paper, the optimal underwater shock isolation to protect human bodies is studied. A simple shock-structure-isolator-human interaction model is first constructed. The model incorporates the effect of fluid-structure interaction, biodynamic response of human body, isolator influence. Based on this model, the optimum shock isolation is then formulated. The performance index and restriction are defined. Thirdly, GA (genetic algorithm) is employed to solve the formulated optimization problem. GA is a powerful evolutionary optimization scheme suitable for large-scale and multi-variable optimization problems that are otherwise hard to be solved by conventional methods. A brief introduction to GA is given in the paper. Finally, the method is applied to an example problem and the limiting performance characteristic is obtained.