Safer high-speed craft on the horizon

Although maligned for its excessive and unnecessary bureaucratic interference, the EU does support worthwhile projects such as the development of safer ?high speed craft? (HSC), i.e. ships with design speeds of well over 30 knots. The need for this project was derived from EU?s attempts to alleviate congestion on the road networks through the implementation of the EU Common Transport Policy. This policy endorses the use of waterborne craft to ease onshore congestion and it is against this backdrop that an increase in demand for HSC has occurred.

As a result, the EU-funded Safety at Speed (S@S) project was set up involving a consortium of 15 partners, spread throughout the EU, to develop new design tools and methodologies to raise the profile of safety issues at the very beginning of the design process. The integration and technical management of the project, provided by classification society Bureau Veritas (BV) and the University of Newcastle with the support of the co-ordinator, FORCE Technology, has provided the driving vision behind the project.

“This S@S design tool will help designers, class societies, yards and government authorities to evaluate high-speed craft at an early design stage, improving safety and cost-effectiveness,” explains Pierre Besse, research director of BV. “S@S has been a very successful example of co-operation between companies and research institutes to harness complementary strengths. We intend to extend that co-operation and the methodologies we have developed to produce a flexible and cost-effective framework for the design and approval all ship types. We need more high-speed ferries, and more innovative ship designs to solve our traffic problems on the roads,” says Besse. “But the history of high-speed craft is quite short, so designers, yards and regulators have very little experience to draw upon. This has created new concerns of how the safety of HSC can be assured when there is a lack of historical data against which to assess new projects. S@S goes a long way to helping overcome that lack of data by building in first principles at the design review stage.”

Key parameters

The tool assists designers of HSC at the preliminary design stage by enabling them to quickly model the risk and cost associated with their design choices with a minimum of input information. The tool will allow early evaluation of alternative design ideas, so several design solutions could be explored at the early stages in ship design, where creativity and innovation could be used to their maximum to achieve safety enhancements cost-effectively over the life time of a ship.

The first stage in the development of the tool was the identification of the parameters (design and operational) that will affect the risk and cost levels of the design. About three hundred key parameters were found to be relevant for the study and these were organised and categorised by system, i.e. user defined, hull form and construction, general arrangement, motion characteristics, systems and procedural.

Setting the parameter values in the tool constitutes the first step of the design evaluation. For easy data entry the parameters have been formatted in simple tabular forms within the user interface. The rest of the calculation is a three steps process enabling the evaluation of the comfort, the risk and the cost level associated with the design. As a semi-automated tool, S@S has a user-friendly interface that includes sections representing the major calculations necessary to evaluate the risk and cost levels of a proposed design.

The core of the consortium, led by BV and the UoN, plans to further enhance the design tool by extending the methodology which will enable it to be used beyond the preliminary design phase to form a flexible and cost-effective framework for the design and approval all ship types. n