Novel materials and intelligent design methods for naval vessels

The new era of maritime security imposes higher demands on naval vessel performance, driving the iterative upgrading of ship design technologies. Novel materials and structures, represented by composites, lattice configurations, and functional metamaterials, have expanded the design space for material properties and established the foundation for functional-structural integration. Concurrently, artificial intelligence technologies, particularly generative large models and intelligent optimization algorithms, provide essential tools for unlocking the potential of these advanced materials and achieving efficient optimization of complex structures. The synergy between these two thrusts - “novel materials enabling structural innovation, and intelligent design pushing performance limits” - has become a critical pathway to overcome traditional design bottlenecks and realize multifunctional integration and performance leaps in naval vessels. Centered on the function and structure integration objective, progress in fiber-reinforced composites, sandwich structures, and acoustic metamaterials, as well as the application status of intelligent design methods such as artificial neural networks, generative large models, and optimization algorithms is reviewed systematically. Emphasis is placed on the synergistic relationship between these domains and their engineering challenges. Future development directions and key scientific questions are also discussed.