Hello.

I am currently working on designing a boat hull for a high school engineering course.  More information on my overall project and process can be found here: Life Saving Technologies

To put it simply, my overall process for modeling the hull has been to loft along guide curves.  The "journals" section of my website describes exactly how I did this.*  As natural with boat hulls, the individual lofted sections bend and twist as they should.  I am unable to use the "merge results" choice in the loft feature as it often results in a "Zero thickness" error.  So I have created over ninety lofts and none of them have merged. (I did use the "thin feature" and it also got rid of the problem, however I don't like the idea of using it for the whole model, and it is not allowing me to go back and deselect it in the feature.)  The model has small "cracks" in it where the lofts don't precisely match up.  Is there some type of surfacing tool I could use to fill this in?

Getting to the root of the problem, I intend to flow test this model and see how it would move through the water as a part of my project.  When I run the flow simulation I get the error-

"There is no fluid volume in the project. Please check geometry or boundary conditions."

or

"Fluid volume recognition has failed.  Please check the geometry."

Furthermore, when I use the "check geometry" tool I receive the following errors:

Status: FAILED. Problems detected

Invalid contacts unresolved: 83

Invalid contacts resolved: 12

Invalid pairs: 1

Analysis type: External

Fluid volume: 0 m^3

If posting screen shots would help to solve this problem, please let me know.

Thank you.

*Since the completion of my latest journal, I have finished all my loft sections.  The screenshots posted there are not of the completed model.