The Finnish marine engineering and design company Deltamarin and the engineering consulting company Safety at Sea (Glasgow) have formed a unique alliance. Combining years of ship design experience with front-end R&D and technological innovation, both companies intend to provide risk-based design and engineering solutions for the complete lifecycle of a ship. Innovative designs are developed by targeting safety and performance in an overall cost-effective configuration. The services cover concept development and layout optimisation, specification development and first-principles design evaluation of collision and grounding damages, fire safety, time to flood and evacuation analysis, system and component redundancies.
New regulations related to probabilistic damage stability, alternative fire safety design and total safety assessment are being fully utilised to reach optimum capacity configuration with high safety at low cost. Instead of having a fixed position of watertight bulkheads, the watertight compartmentation can now be optimised utilising transverse, longitudinal and even horizontal watertight subdivision. The arrangement can be optimised for efficient functionality, simplicity, low costs and required level of safety. The optimisation routine has been developed and already successfully applied by both companies in the concept stage of several newbuilding projects.
The first layout is developed on the basis of functional requirements without any restrictions. A layout model comprises all pertinent variables, including number and position of bulkheads, length, width and position of side casings, deck heights, tank locations, etc. In order to achieve desired results objectives must be carefully defined and balanced – is it important to maximize unobstructed deck area, minimize steel weight, achieve higher safety level, or optimize all requirements? Normally 1000 to 2000 alternatives are developed automatically, which are then filtered down to a handful of best arrangements using risk evaluation criteria. The design team then selects the most promising ones and develops the final platform or alternative platforms as basis for further work. Typical examples have shown increased capacity, simplified arrangement, less steel structure and improved safety. The risk-based approach can be applied to fire safety, lifesaving, structures, hydrodynamic performance, fuel saving, environmental issues and in specification development to cover full lifecycle.
