MEGA was involved in 2 European projects, Leanships and NAVAIS, both have received founding from the European’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
Photos courtesy: Damen Shipyard, Marine Engineering
LeanShips was a Horizon 2020 European Innovation project that aimed to demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of energy saving and emission reduction technologies at full scale. The project supported developments that made new and existing vessels more efficient and less polluting.
LeanShips was a European Innovation Project (Horizon 2020 framework programme) based on seven, mostly full scale demonstrators on board ships. The project aimed to put innovations into practice by carrying out seven demonstrator show cases (Demo Cases) that combine technologies for efficient and less polluting vessels with end-users’ needs and requirements.
Dedicated teams of equipment manufacturers (technology providers), shipyards (technology integrators), and ship owners (technology users) made certain that the innovations developed in the project were matured to market uptake capability. The ship types addressed by the project were small to midsized vessels for cargo and maritime operations, leisure and inland shipping.
Making new and existing vessels more efficient and less polluting indicated the need for significant industry involvement. In this respect, 81% of the project partners were industrial enterprises. In total, 41 partners from various EU member states were involved in LeanShips. The project started in 2015 and had a duration of 4 (four) years. It was coordinated by Damen Shipyards Group and jointly managed by the Netherlands Maritime Technology Foundation (NMT), the Center of Maritime Technologies (CMT) from Germany and Cetena, the Italian Ship Research Centre.
The demonstrator case MEGA was involved in would provide a prototype harbour tug, namely the RSD (Reverse Stern Drive) 2513 CNG, which operates with compressed natural gas (CNG) as a fuel. For the time being there are four tugs operational with liquefied natural gas as a fuel worldwide. These kind of ugs use medium speed engines, which are big, heavy and expensive. The presented demonstrator would use high speed engines, provided by MTU, to directly drive the thrusters. The use of these high speed natural gas engines offers a high power density, matching the compact ship design, combined with cost-efficiency, compared to the medium speed engines, being used in the existing LNG fuelled tugs. It will be the first use of high speed gas engines in a maritime application in this power range.
Photos courtesy: Damen Shipyard, Marine Engineering
NAVAIS develops a platform-based modular product family approach supported by the 3DEXPERIENCE® (DASSAULT SYSTEMES) integrated business platform. This concept will increase efficiency in vessel design and flexibility in production networks. NAVAIS focuses on passenger/ road ferries and multi-use workboats integrating sustainability in the design of the ships. NAVAIS supports the transfer from an engineered-to-order business model to an assemble-to-order business model, which allows shorter process lead times, constant quality, reduced design and production costs and, thereby increasing competitiveness of the European shipbuilding industry.
AREAS OF INTEREST: NAVAIS works on six areas of attention throughout the lifetime of the project to achieve its goals.
NAVAIS uses system engineering approaches to develop the principles, procedures and a re-use component library for modular design and production and will apply these to develop two platform-based product families: passenger/road ferries and multi-use workboats. For each product family a demonstrator will be developed to TRL9 “digital twin”-level, validated and assessed on low impact environmental performance e.g. discharges to air and water, underwater radiated noise and cost-benefit aspects. The demonstrators are a 400 passengers/120 cars E-ferry and a multi-use workboat equipped for aquaculture activities.
A major aspect of the platform-based modular approach is the change in value chain management. The current class approval procedure of engineered-to-order designs will be replaced by a procedure where pre-engineered product modules are approved by class, stored in a re-use library and applied in new vessel modular designs. This transfer from an engineered-to-order business model to an assemble-to-order business model will allow shorter process lead-times, constant quality, reduced design and production costs and better integration of the SME supply chain. Exploitation of results is expected at the end of the project duration.
The NAVAIS innovative solution is the adoption of platform-based product family and modular product architecture principles for passenger/road ferries and for workboats. Key results of the NAVAIS concept are expected to include: “30% higher efficiency in ship design development, production lead-times and cost, testing and approval times for customized vessels and in reduction of rework during the warranty period”.
NAVAIS introduces two innovative platform-based product families that use modularity in design and production. The core element of this approach is the re-usable library of modules that are:
- Of stable quality due to the re-usable character of the modules
- Faster to produce due to the already proven and approved (class) module characteristics
- Cheaper to produce due to economies of scale and the repetitive element
Overall, the NAVAIS project aimed to create a new paradigm for ship building that will enable the industry to better respond to changing market needs and demands, while reducing costs and improving the environmental performance of the sector. By developing a platform-based modular product family approach, it contributed to the creation of a more flexible, efficient and sustainable shipbuilding industry, better able to meet the environmental challenges of the 21st century.
Discover more at https://www.navais.eu/ website