Engineering calculation of a midwater fishing trawl

This paper presents a method for calculating the power and geometric properties of a midwater fishing trawl, which is a complicated engineering structure made up of tied flexible (threads, ropes, flap) and rigid (rigging, trawl boards) elements. A computational model, the functional relations for internal forces and geometric characteristics of the trawl, and a calculation procedure based on the finite element method are proposed. The computational algorithm is implemented on a graphics processing unit of a personal computer with the use of DirectCompute, Shader Model 5, and high-level shader language. The performance and resource intensity of the algorithm applied in the computer-aided design system for industrial fishing gear are assessed in terms of the number of trawl nodes and computing equipment. A comparative analysis of the calculated and experimentally obtained characteristics of the trawl physical model is presented. According to the results, the computational error in geometric characteristics and internal forces is less than 3 and 5%, respectively.