In order to improve the survival capability of passenger and ro-ro ships in event of fire or flooding, in the last few years a set of international Regulations has been issued. In particular, the Regulation SOLAS “Safe Return to Port” is addressed towards design criteria able to guarantee adequate functionality of the ship when a casualty occurs. The Regulation requires the evacuation of the ship when a given threshold of damage (i.e., fire and flood) is exceeded. The evacuation analysis has become of primary importance even in the early-stage design. Indeed, the new amendments to SOLAS Regulation II-2/13.3.2.7 makes the evacuation analysis mandatory for both new and existing passenger and ro-ro ships since the early steps of the project. In this paper, the current IMO Guidelines have been analysed, and a case study for the evacuation of a 3600-person cruise ship has been carried out by means of both a simplified and an advanced method. To perform advanced calculations, two different software, based on virtual reality, have been used and the results have been compared with simplified method ones.

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.

The European Inland Waterway Transport (IWT) is a viable and effective alternative to road and rail transport of persons and goods on the European network. Currently, the IWT is less exploited than the 'traditional' transport despite the European inland waterway network spans more than 29000 km and includes over 400 important ports and terminals. The design of inland waterway vessel is heavily affected by the environmental constraints and the Rule framework. About the latter, in the last few years several organizations played an important role in the definition of the Rule framework in Europe: the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), the European Union and various local area commissions. The tendency of international regulations is to make inland waterway decarbonised by reducing pollutant emissions through ships with zero-emission propulsion. Moreover, the design is also affected by environmental constraints like width and depth of the canals, air draft, etc. In this paper, a 'new concept' for inland waterway vessel, which considers the modern national and international regulations and the environmental constraints, has been defined. A case study and the results obtained have been analysed.

In order to preserve the marine environment, especially in coastal areas and close to urban areas, the reduction of pollutant emissions is of primary importance. Even though traditionally not too much effort is given to propulsion system optimization, the necessity to ensure low pollutant emission level is a constraint that must be considered in small crafts design. Moreover, very often during the design of small crafts great attention is paid to achieving the desired performance only in terms of speed. In this paper, the design of a small craft conceived as a research vessel able to operate in coastal protected marine areas is presented. The particular operational profile requires the adoption both of a hybrid-electric propulsion system and a dedicated station-keeping system. Specifically, a suitable LVDC Integrated Power System has been used to ensure Zero Emission Mode both during navigation and station-keeping operational profiles.

The increasing focus on air pollution reduction for transportation systems requires to adopt new technologies and innovative solutions to limit vehicles emissions. In case of inland waterway transportation (IWT), once vessels have to operate close to urban areas or in natural reserves, the necessity to provide a'green navigation' is of primary importance. With this specific aim, especially for small crafts, the adoption of an hybrid-electric power system grant a significant pollution reduction, leading also to a possible Zero Emission Mode (ZEM) navigation. However, the particular configuration of inland waterways makes the estimation of vessels' hydrodynamic performances harder compared to a seagoing ship, because of restricted waters effects, affecting both resistance and manoeuvring characteristics. For this purpose, time domain simulation program has been developed to estimate the effective power demand of an inland vessel during a specific route. The program has been tested on the specific case of a passenger vessel designed for the Grado lagoon, where all the reference route bathymetric data were available. By means of the simulations it has been possible to state whether the vessel is suitable to operate in ZEM mode during the service.