This is a well-established practice in the oil & gas industry, but less common in the shipbuilding and shipping industry. One explanation is that most vessels for the merchant fleet have been built by shipyards according to quite standardized designs to minimize building cost while more specialized vessels generally have been improvements and amendments of existing designs. However, with increasing fuel costs and the energy efficiency legislation as introduced by IMO, feasibility studies will become more important. WP 1 will develop assessment models and software enabling feasibility studies which will be applied and tested on the business cases.

Objective

Develop and test assessment models that enable ship designers and innovators to investigate a number of alternative designs at an early stage.

Gaps

There is a lack of assessment methods and tools that enable comparison of alternative designs at the feasibility stage of the design process.

Current studies and state-of-the-art design practice regarding concept, speed and capability tends to be based on marginal improvements of existing designs and solutions instead of challenging todays practice.

Research tasks

Identify the areas which can give the largest improvement of energy efficiency and emission reductions.

Develop simplified versions of the analytical and numerical models enabling comparison of a number of alternative designs in the feasibility phase of the project.

Test and use these models in the business cases.