Integration of seakeeping and powering computational techniques with meteo-marine forecasting data for in-service ship energy assessment

The integrated use of modern seakeeping and powering computational techniques and state of the art meteo-marine forecasting and hindcasting resources has the potential of disclosing new ways to approach some relevant issues, such as for instance operations planning at sea, weather routing, in-service ship energy management and pollution control. Such an integrated approach could be profitably used during ship design for optimizing both hydrodynamic and powering characteristics too. In this paper the authors describe preliminary results of a study aimed at estimating the in-service optimal efficiency propulsion plant setting for a ship in real seaways conditions. To this aim numerical simulations of seakeeping and powering conditions of a ship along a real route in the Mediterranean sea have been performed. In the simulations detailed meteo-marine hindcasting data, consisting of wind data and complete directional waves spectra along the route, have been used. Strip theory has been applied for the seakeeping computation in order to evaluate the contribution of waves added resistance in realistic seaways. Such results have been then used in powering computation, to evaluate the dynamically evolving engine conditions in terms of fuel consumption. The results of such computations have been analyzed to evaluate the in-service optimization potentialities for the available setting of propulsion plant. Finally, heuristic hints are preliminarily suggested by the authors as a support for the use of scenario simulations with realistic meteo-marine data in the powering matching phases of the ship design process.