The continuous increasing attention to environmental sustainability and air pollution reduction for transport systems, requires not only to adopt new technologies and innovative solutions to limit vehicles emissions, but also to study their life-cycle. In case of inland navigation, the operation close to urban areas or in natural protected environments requires the adoption of a green propulsion. Moreover, especially for small crafts, the problem of ship disposal at the end of life is of high importance, even once plastic materials should be disposed, due to high costs and process complexities. For such a reason the design of a new generation green passenger craft requires the analysis and knowledge of multiple engineering fields, that could lead to a fast and successful design only by means of an integrated approach. In the present work, this approach will be applied to the design of a passenger craft, adopting an hybrid electric powering system and build with strip planking process for wooden ships. The description of the construction process will be here described together with the on-board electric power system. The integrated approach allowed also to directly evaluate the vessel operative profile and asses whether the vessel could perform a Zero Emission Mode navigation.

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To face the design of a new ship concept, the evaluation of multiple feasible solutions concerning several aspects of naval architecture and marine engineering is necessary. Compressed natural gas technologies are in continuous development; therefore, there are no available databases for existing ships to use as a basis for the design process of a new unit. In this sense, the adoption of a modern multi-attribute decision-based method can help the designer for the study of a completely new ship prototype. A database of compressed natural gas ships was generated starting from a baseline hull, varying six hull-form parameters by means of the design of experiment technique. Between the attributes involved in the concept design process, stability is for sure one of the most relevant topics, both for intact and damaged cases. This work describes two approaches to identify the compliance of a ship with the intact stability regulations based on the ship main geometrical quantities. Moreover, a metamodel based on the maximum floodable length concept (damage stability) allows determining the main internal subdivision of the ship. The metamodel outcomes were compared with results from direct calculations on a ship external to the database, highlighting the adequate accuracy given by the developed methods.

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For the natural gas transportation, several technologies can be applied, having different effectiveness and costs depending on the analysed case. The Mediterranean Sea is presenting a typical scenario where compressed natural gas (CNG) transportation is particularly attractive compared to liquefied natural gas (LNG) and pipelines, not only for stranded gas shipping but also for transportations cases where CNG is usually representing the most economically convenient solution. Approaching the design of a CNG ship is not an easy task, since the pressure vessel (PV) technology is strongly influencing the ship layout and hull form. Here an enhanced conceptual design method is adopted; taking into account the economic-financial issues together with logistics, in order to determine the best fleet composition selecting the best ships for the selected scenario. The ships composing the fleet are supposed to load/offload the natural gas on buoys; hence, dynamic positioning (DP) will also be considered as an attribute in the evaluation of alternative designs. As final outcome of the enhanced concept design process it will be possible to speed up drawing of the preliminary lines plan and general arrangement plan of the sister ships composing the fleet.

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The Bucintoro project has been relaunched after years in stand-by under the name of Bucintoro of the Third Millennium . Many contributors from Italy and even from France have accepted the challenge with the purpose of building the modern version of the last Bucintoro burned by Napoleon troops at the end of the Venetian Republic. The previous phase of development brought to a business plan aimed at managing the building and management of the new golden vessel. The hull form of the new Bucintoro will be a perfect copy of the historical one with a special double deck galley inclusive of a lower deck for 168 rowers seated in four at 21 oars each side and an upper deck for authorities, both fitted now with modern systems in order to improve safe navigation. The complete structural scantling drawings with midship section have been already certified by RINA classification society. After a summary on the age-old history of the vessel and a review of technical issues developed and already certifed, this paper addresses the primary static and hydrodynamic issues. To this end, optimal subdivision of internal volumes to comply with intact and damage stability rules as well as theoretical assessment of resistance and powering performance are carried out. Since the Bucintoro will sail in an urban area, in the restricted waters of the Venice Lagoon and in natural parks, manoeuvring and hybrid propulsion are of major concern also to cut emissions. All these issues will be theoretically assessed by means of analytical and numerical codes.

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The compressed natural gas (CNG) transport is becoming nowadays an attractive solution not only for stranded gas shipping where current technologies like liquefied natural gas (LNG) and pipelines are not economically competitive, but also for long-enough distance transport of large volumes of natural gas, where LNG still represents the most economical solution. In fact, recent studies on pressure vessels (PV) materials allow to significantly reduce the ship displacement in case of PVs Type 3 and Type 4 when compared to existing prototype designs with PVs Type 1 and Type 2, also leading to completely different hull forms. Since CNG ship design is a new research field for Naval Architecture, the concept design phase assumes an utmost importance with respect to design of well-known ship types, not only for the main parameters determination and performances assessment, but also for the study of completely different solutions for some subsystems. To this purpose, the present paper presents a technical-economic comparison between two different kinds of propulsion systems: conventional diesel drive propulsion with propellers and a complete diesel electric solution with pods. The differences between the two solutions are influencing both internal layout and ship dimensions, leading to two completely different ship concepts. These have been compared to determine the most cost effective solution not only for the single CNG ship but mostly for the fleet composition in a given transport scenario.

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To manage the overall design process of complex systems like ships, particular attention has to be deserved to the connections and overlapping between the design stages. Therefore, the paper addresses the complex aspect of quickly moving from concept to preliminary design, so yielding an initial design in a decreasing time span. Concept design is here treated as a MADM synthesis process, where a huge number of feasible designs are randomly generated by an adaptive Monte Carlo sampling and ships’ properties are assigned by means of metamodeling techniques. Non-dominated solutions are then filtered as a Pareto set identifying a short list of preferred solutions up to the “best possible” design characterized by top-level specifications (geometry, ship performance, capex, opex, etc.). This procedure has its core in the trade-off between technical and economic attributes also embracing uncertainty in a ship’s lifetime perspective. A set of ship parameters are oriented to preliminary hull geometry and general arrangement definition. Hierarchical dependencies are used to match the concept hull form with modular internal spaces. The process is here applied to a case study, consisting in the initial design of a Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) ship as member of a fleet optimised for gas shipping from the Zohr field (Egypt) to the Adriatic Sea.@en