Approaching Environmental Performance in Conceptual Ship Design

摘要

Environmental issues have gained importance during the last decades. The traditional ship design procedure already includes a well established trade-off between economical and technical performance. However, the integration of environmental analysis is relatively new, and there are many research questions to be answered. In this context we wish to suggest some relevant tasks to address environmental issues in the preliminary stage, primarily focusing on air emissions and energy efficiency topics. The present work discusses thus these tasks inside the procedure of a generic conceptual design methodology. It also briefly mentions two important subjects in the field. First, defining a common understanding on the environmental impact of a ship and an overview on the recent studies. And second, presenting the characteristics of the conceptual ship design domain, enhancing the importance of the inclusion of environmental issues in the stage where changes have a bigger impact. Two use cases are presented as example, an AHTS vessel and the role of the operational profile, and a RoRo ship and the impact of air emission control. We also introduce at the end of the work ten research topics, with the intention of instigate bright minds exploit the field in the future.