The 2 shipyards are the largest in Portugal and both have recently implemented Autoship for hull design, Autohydro for intact and damage stability and Autobuild for internal structural design. ENVC also uses Autoplate for shell expansion projects. ENVC completed it's first design using Autoship, Autoplate and Autohydro on a delivered 170M, 22,000 TDW tanker to PCS Phosphate Inc. of North Carolina, USA.

Both shipyards evaluated mainframe computer CAD/CAM systems for their design work, but made a corporate decision that the Autoship System with it's ease-of-use, Windows interface, provided the best long-term solution for their engineering departments.

As the Chief Engineer from ENVC, Mr. Carlos Rodrigues commented recently on the ease-of-use of the Autoplate program: "Autoship is powerful, easy to learn and to use. As Autoplate uses the same interface as Autoship, I didn't find any difficulty in self learning using the new Autoplate for shell expansion. It is easy to create butts and seams (boundaries of the plates) mainly using projected curves to the shell, because I only needed to fair curves in 2D planes and after that project them to the shell in order that I can obtain the plate boundaries. The method to create plates is very intuitive, through just clicking plate boundaries."

Autoship Systems Corp. (ASC) also announces a new bundled suite of programs for medium to large size shipyards. 'The AutoSHIP CAD Package' is an integrated suite of programs for hull design, power prediction, intact and damage stability, internal structural design and shell expansion. ASC also supplies shipyards with NC cutting, nesting and milling programs.

For further information contact Autoship Systems Corporation 312-611 Alexander St., Vancouver BC Canada V6A 1E1. Tel: 604-254-4171, email:info@autoship.com