Low-impact design and operational principles

The mission of work package 4 is to provide guidelines and goals for low-impact design of vessels. Low-impact refers to reducing or preferably eliminating the emissions of the vessel to the environment. Not only exhaust emissions (CO2, NOX, SOX, etc.) will be considered, but also emissions such as oil, ballast water, waves and noise, which covers both airborne noise and underwater radiated noise (URN).

The work will start by making an overview of existing rules and regulations with respect to the various emission types. Based on these rules, the goals (or KPIs) for the new ship designs will be established. Thereafter, a list of possible technological solutions will be compiled. Since typically not all technological solutions can be combined in a single ship to reach the KPIs; the right combination of techniques has to be selected.

Therefore, a tool will be developed to identify the technologies applicable to that specific design case, based on suitable selection criteria. The selection tool will be able to deal with a variable list of technologies and selection criteria. That ensures that future technologies or new selection criteria can be added when they become applicable.

The designs following from the other work packages will also need to be validated; do they actually meet the emission KPIs? For most KPIs, there are tools or data available to use for this validation step. For URN, however, these tool do not yet cover all conditions that are typical for ferries and workboats. Therefore, the URN prediction tools will be extended to include pressure side cavitation noise and noise during dynamic positioning.