Seminar - Latest research on maritime analyses

To be able to reduce the risk of shipping accidents, the environmental footprint, and maritime infrastructure costs, researchers need to continue to develop and test new prediction methods and tools. Improved and innovative maritime analyses will allow experts to make more accurate predictions about the effects of certain changes made to routes, infrastructures or traffic patterns, and provide better decision support to maritime actors. In late December, the latest research on maritime risk and environmental analyses was presented in a seminar at SSPA in Gothenburg.

On December 17th, 2019, SSPA hosted a seminar titled “Maritime traffic patterns, hydrodynamics and risk analyses in Öresund-Kattegat-Skagerrak” together with the Danish Maritime Authority and DFDS, and with the collaboration of Lighthouse. This seminar was aimed at industry, academia and the public sector, and was a concluding milestone in the research project MARIA – MARItime Analyses (co-funded by Interreg ÖKS). The project will end on January 31st, 2020. 

- “In the research project MARIA, we have identified, developed, tested and improved maritime data analyses and also made new methods and tools available for researchers to collaborate across the ÖKS area”, says Nicole Costa, Project Manager at SSPA.

Below you find information about some of the research that was presented during the seminar. For more project information, please contact Nicole Costa.

Defining normal ship behaviour and safety distance to other ships in open waters

When ships approach each other, there are recommendations on the minimum distance to keep. The geometrical shape that this distance forms around the vessel is defined as the ship domain and it has been studied since the early 1970s. The progress in computer capacity and the introduction of Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) challenge SSPA to further investigate the domain and use new methods and knowledge. When performing maritime spatial planning, e.g., when implementing traffic separation schemes or when building maritime infrastructure, it is very important to understand normal ship behaviour. A poor understanding of how a ship normally behaves may lead to unreliable estimations of risks at sea. To assess how ship domains, vary under different geographical settings and in different types of meetings, SSPA performed a case study. Our researchers studied over 600,000 ship encounters at 36 locations around the Swedish coast. The conclusion is that the ship domain has the shape of an ellipse with half axes radii of 0.9 and 0.45 nautical miles in open waters. In contrast to previous research, it has also been discovered that the ship domain is unrelated to the length of the ship.

Skin Friction database for the maritime sector

Skin friction is responsible for 50 – 85% of the total resistance the ship must overcome to keep its speed. It is therefore important from an economical and environmental point of view to ensure that the cost of increased fuel consumption due to roughness does not surpass the cost of surface maintenance. It is not a trivial task for ship owners and shipyards to decide which coating to use or how often the surfaces should be recoated or cleaned based on cost/benefit analyses. SSPA has completed a research project with the aim to gain increased knowledge of the effect a rough surface has on skin friction. This project has also resulted in an interactive tool that can be used to estimate fuel consumption without requiring background knowledge in hydrodynamics. This tool is the “Skin Friction database”, which will hopefully contribute to better surface treatment of vessels, that in the end can reduce costs and emission of greenhouse gases from the maritime sector.

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Improved and innovative maritime analyses will allow experts to make more accurate predictions about the effects of certain changes made to routes, infrastructures or traffic patterns, and provide better decision support to maritime actors. 
 
In late December, the latest research on maritime risk and environmental analyses was presented in a seminar in Gothenburg.