Development of cost competitive and fuel efficient short sea vessels

Det er behov for å utvikle nærskipsfartøy som bruker vesentlig mindre drivstoff per tonn transportert. Dette kan oppnås ved å bygge større fartøy, bygge slankere eller seile langsommere. Men da nærskipsfartøy konkurrerer med lastebil og lastmengdene tross alt er begrenset er hverken det å seile raskere eller å bygge større skip aktuelt. Målsetningen for dette prosjektet er derfor å utvikle skip som bruker vesntlig mindre drivstoff. Dette skal oppnås ved bedre kombinasjoner av hovedimmensjoneer som gir mindre motstand og mindre tileggsmotstand i bølger og vind. Prosjektet har hatt god fremdrift både på CFD, på design og på økonomiske beregninger. Vi jobber nå (august - oktober 2016) med å gjøre ferdig et journal paper som vil bli sent inn til en god internasjonal journal.

There is a need for development of new short sea vessels which use significantly less fuel per ton transported. Increasing vessel size (Lindstad et al, 2012) or reducing operational speed (Lindstad et al, 2011) is two well known principles for reducing the fuel consumption (Lindstad, 2013). However in short sea trades available cargoes and the required frequencies in will in general limit cargo sizes and in addition physical port restrictions might limit the maximum size of the vesssels to be used. While competition with road only solutions limits the opportunties for reducing operational speeds bellow the present levels, which already have been reduced significantly compared to the design speeds according to the third IMO GHG study (Smith et al 2014). The starting point for this project is therefore that fuel reductions has to be achived as a function of a combination of main dimensions and hull forms which requires less power at the similar speeds and that speeds in general rather has to increased than further reduced to compete with road only solutions. There is an increasing understanding of the importance of including sea-keeping and maneuvering-related aspects. In this project the TOOL will be used to investigate and assess typical short vessels built AS IS, versus more slender designs built within typical port restrictions, versus what could be achieved for optimized designs built without any port restrictions. All assessed designs will have equal cargo carrying capacity, single hull, equal building materials and total cost within the same range. The proposed project will quantify the penality on restrictions on dimmensions, which often is the case in short sea and will therfore enable defining new short sea vessels which use significantly less fuel per ton transported which will give a cost reduction which is much larger than the annual increase of capex cost due to the marginal additional cost for the more slender and hydrodynamic hull forms