Introduction:

Naval architects have always faced the challenge of demonstrating the effect of potential design changes when vessels are brought into operation. The actual effects are highly dependent on the operating profile of the vessel, i.e. where, when and how it will sail. Traditional methods and tools for evaluating designs do not offer an opportunity to handle complex issues of this sort.

Virtual testing will improve the estimation of vessel performance by simulating the interaction of hydro¬dynamics, power production and service equipment in a realistic operating context. This is of particular importance for assessing the benefits and challenges of alternative hull forms, new power production systems and alternative service equipment arrangement. Examples include bow forms for improved handling of added resistance, dual-fuel and LNG engines, fuel-cells and batteries, and new cranes and winches. Improved ability to rapidly analyse and verify new design solutions represents a significant contribution to the competitive position of the involved industrial partners in terms of developing innovative ships that are more energy efficient and have a have increased operability.

Virtual testing can be done at different levels of detail, from the dynamic time-domain simulations with full physical models and milliseconds time-steps to the static discrete-event simulations with average value calculations and hour-long timesteps.

In this virtual testing phase 1 project, the focus is on the static simulations, which allows us to evaluate the ship performance over years of operation.

Objectives

• Improving early stage design decisions by enabling simulation of long-term performance of new ship technology and design solutions
• Validate simulations against full-scale performance

Expected impacts

• Improved competiveness of ship design-ers using the GYMIR application
• Use of the application results in more energy-efficient ship designs

Approach

1. Determine the adequate parameters and detail level for a virtually testing at different design stages
2. Develop a methodology for evaluation and benchmarking of alternative ship design in different operational profile scenarios
3. Simulate the logistic system and derive the operational profile for the ship and/or define standard scatter diagrams for virtual testing conditions
4. Integrate static hydrodynamic and power system models with metocean and logistic models in an user-friendly framework
5. Industry test cases evaluating and benchmarking alternative ship design in different operational profile scenarios

WP involvement

WP 2 Hull and Propeller: Static hydrodynamic modelling
WP 3 Power Systems and Fuel: Static power system modelling
WP 4 Ship system integration: Integration of simulation models, framework for long-term simulation and validation of models against full-scale data

Project team

Participants:

Project leader: Trond Johnsen, MARINTEK (now SINTEF Ocean)

Industry partners: Havyard, Vard, Rolls-Royce Marine, DNV-GL

Contribution from industry partners:

• Sharing of background from similar previous or ongoing R&D projects
• Knowledge and experience needed to define methodology, KPIs and requirements for the models
• Testing of the models on own cases
• Full-scale data and experience for validation of models

Timeline

Januar - December 2016

Achievements

A first version of a simulation tool (GYMIR) for early-stage design assessment, simulating the long-term performance of a ship in realistic operational profiles, has been developed during 2016 and presented to the Senter partners on october 2016. The tool enables the integration of ship sub-systems models (WP2, WP3).

The sub-project was finalized in 2016 and the Gymir simulation tool was further developed and tested through business cases in a new Sub-project SP7, integrating the results of 2016- sub-projects SP2, SP3 and SP4.