Cavitation, described as the formation of vapour/gas bubbles of a flowing liquid in a region where the pressure of the liquid falls below its vapour pressure, often leads to vibration and damage of mechanical components, for example, bearings, fuel injectors, valves, propellers and rudders, impellers, pumps and hydro turbines. Cavitation erosion when experienced, normally leads to significant additional repair and maintenance costs or component replacement. Even if erosion problems can be avoided by design or operation, most often the performance of the systems is sub-optimal because countermeasures by design are needed to prevent cavitation problems. Despite the long-lasting problems associated with cavitation, computational models that could simulate cavitation and identify locations of erosion are still not thoroughly developed. The proposed interdisciplinary training and research programme aims to provide new experimental data and an open-source simulation tool for hydrodynamic cavitation and induced erosion. Insight into the detailed bubble collapse mechanism leading to surface erosion will be realised through DNS simulations, which are now feasible by the significant progress in fluid flow computational methods and parallel simulations. Information from such models will be implemented as sub-grid scale models of URANS and LES approaches, typically employed for cavitation simulation at engineering scales. Model validation will be performed against new advanced X-ray, laser diagnostics and high speed imaging measurements to be performed as part of this project. Application of the developed models to cases of industrial interest includes fuel injectors, marine propellers, hydro-turbines, pumps and mechanical heart valves. From this understanding the development of methodologies for design of cavitation-free or remedial measures and operation of devices suffering from cavitation erosion can then be established for the benefit of the relevant communities.

The SeaTech consortium is proposing to develop two symbiotic ship engine and propulsion innovations, that when combined, lead to an increase of 30% in fuel efficiency and radical emission reductions of 99% for NOx, 99% for SOx, 46% for CO2 and 94% for particulate matter. The innovations will be characterized by high retrofitability, maintainability and offer ship owners a return-on-investment of 400% due to fuel and operational cost savings. The proposed renewable-energy-based propulsion innovation is the bio-mimetic dynamic wing mounted at the ship bow to augment ship propulsion in moderate and higher sea states, capturing wave energy, producing extra thrust and damping ship motions. The proposed power generation innovation is based on the idea of achieving ultra-high energy conversion efficiency by precisely controlling the auto-ignition of the fuel mixture at every operating point of the engine for achieving radically reduced emissions. The ultimate objective of the project is to upscale both technologies, demonstrate them in relevant environment and finally model the expected complementarities and synergy effects of deploying both innovations on a short-sea vessel scenario by extrapolating demonstration data with the help of a bespoke Advanced Data Analytics Framework. The project partners envisage to commercialize both symbiotic innovations in the European and Asian short-sea market by 2025, followed by the adjacent deep-sea market. Assuming only 10% of EU short-sea vessels would be retrofitted with SeaTech, this would result in CO2 savings of 32.5 million tons annually, which equals the emissions of 200.000 passenger cars/year. Further impact includes savings of EUR 85.2 billion in health and climate change damages due to lower emissions, the creation of +100 jobs at the project partners with a cumulative net profit of EUR 820 million in the first 5 years post-commercialisation, and the indirect creation of 250 new jobs in the EU shipyard industry.

The need to reduce energy consumption and emissions to bring global warming to a halt is unprecedented. Although there are energy saving strategies, most innovations cannot simply be merged in conventional ship design. As the solution for making ships carbon neutral will likely come from the use of several energy sources, a clever energy management becomes a key element in a unified ship system. De-rating of engines combined with sailing at slower speed seems to be a relatively easy way to reduce fuel consumption and GHG emissions and will most likely be used in the industry. However, this does come with reduced transport work per ship and reduced earnings. In our view, most other savings methods can deliver savings up to about 15%, not the substantial savings that are required. OPTIWISE aims at two solutions that when combined go well beyond 30% when the innovations are delivered as proposed in this project: Wind propulsion with a rigorous, holistic optimised ship design, control and operation, including a change in conventional propeller propulsion. Wind propulsion is showing its potential in research and market introductions. The holistic ship design and operation pair well with that. For common ships there is much to be gained, especially with the increased freedom in the aft ship geometry with a shift to electric propulsion. Making best use of wind propulsion also requires a rethink of designs, control and operations. To meet the objectives of this call, generic tool and methodology development are planned for optimization, performance and energy management. New developments will be applied to 3 Demo cases, consisting of a Bulk Carrier, a Tanker and a Passenger Vessel. Verification of the results will be done by testing a rotor sail rig, model tests on two ships and Bridge simulations with crew training. By the end of this project it will be clear how much energy can be save with the latest sail propulsion systems for the three types of vessels investigated