The general objective of sHYpS is to support the decarbonisation of the shipping industry, but leveraging on previous and on-going work and investment made by a specific cruise vessel owner and some consortium members. It will develop a hydrogen-based solution, which can be adapted to multiple types of vessels and in some cases can already achieve the IMO’s target for 2030 and 2050. The project will develop (i) a novel hydrogen storage intermodal 40’ ISO C-type container; (ii) the complete detailed design of module containerised power plant based on an optimised PEM fuel cell system; and (iii) the dedicated hydrogen-supply logistics. The project will define the logistics based on both the swapping of pre-filled containers and of the prospective scale-up of the storage capacity and the supply applied to a specific Norwegian port use-case. This enables the rapid implementation of the supply-chain without waiting for the full infrastructure to be in place. The project will show how this approach can support a remarkable portion of the vessels in EU waters. The project will use a window of opportunity to install the storage, gas handling and energy management systems, and a reduced power fuel cell power plant on one of the cruise vessel owner’s new-build cruise ships. The system will be tested during a shakedown cruise by 2026. Having the future full 6 MW system in place would allow a 50% reduction in carbon emissions on a 14 day fjord cruise on this vessel type, of which an ongoing new build programme is in place (as well as other types to which the system may be applicable). With the right logistics in place, the ISO container technology can be applied in hundreds of units per year. In the meantime, the elements of this project can be applied in more vessel segments at sea and on inland waterways, applicable to hundreds of vessels on the order books of commercial fleets. The value-chain includes liquid hydrogen suppliers, giving the opportunity to accelerate supply of thousands of tonnes of liquid hydrogen per year in the next twenty years.

The OCEAN project approach is to contribute to the mitigation of navigational accidents by supporting the navigators to do an even better job than they do presently. Such support does not only relate to an ‘on-the-spot’ enhancement of navigational awareness – including the presence of marine mammals and floating containers – or an improved performance of evasive manoeuvring and other mitigating actions. The project will go both deeper and wider, to identify and suggest amendments or improvements in the most pertinent factors that may contribute to events becoming accidents: training, technical, human, or organisational factors, operational constraints, processes and procedures, commercial pressures or structural issues like shortcomings in rules and regulations. From an implementation perspective, the OCEAN project will develop new design methods and operational processes, as well as integrating existing technologies to provide novel and improved functionalities. A key convergence point is the overall navigation situation assessment made by the operator, and the project aims at providing an integrated and designed-for-the-purpose presentation of near-field threats and navigational hinderances. The project outputs will include an Evasive Manoeuvring Agent, intended to work in tandem with existing ship systems, continuously assessing navigational safety with respect to grounding or collision with other ships, fixed structures or other threats, and the visualization of advanced manoeuvring prediction. OCEAN will suggest the creation of a European Navigational Hazard infrastructure to collect, process and distribute data relating to the presence of marine mammals and floating containers. Further innovations comprise input to upcoming and revised international standards for maritime communications and practical methods to design maritime instruments and devices, all of which will be demonstrated in consolidated scenarios.

Many offshore structures for exploiting oil/gas in ocean and for harnessing marine renewable wave energy, tidal current energy and offshore wind energy have been and will be designed and operated. During the design of these structures, it is essential to consider their responses in the worst situation possibly met(extreme sea). In such situation, the breaking wave impact and the viscous effects are widely recognized to be important. These factors disqualified the well-established linear or second-order wave diffraction analysis based in the frequency domain which has been usually used during the design. However, the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools with ability to model the wave impact and viscously may take several days or weeks to produce reliable results for the response of structures in a required large sea area with dimensions at the level of tens or hundreds of wavelengths in 3-D and for many wave periods. Alternative tools based on the fully nonlinear potential theory (FNPT) have relatively higher computational efficiency, e.g. the Quasi Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian Finite Element method (QALE-FEM) may complete the simulation within an overnight. However, they cannot deal with the breaking wave impact and take the viscous/ effects into account. Therefore, how to efficiently model viscosity/turbulence and the breaking wave impact associated with wave-structure interaction remains to be a key challenge in offshore and marine engineering. This project will carry out the research to tackle the challenge by developing a novel approach to efficiently model the interaction between large-domain 3D extreme waves and the offshore structures with consideration of viscous/turbulent effects and breaking wave impact. The new method takes the advantage of the CFD tools and the FNPT based methods by integrating them in a single approach. It is expected to have the computational efficiency at a similar level to the FNPT based QALE-FEM , i.e. simulating wave-structure interaction with viscosity and wave breaking in a required large 3D sea area on modern PCs within an overnight. The new development may make it possible to simulate large floating structures subjected to extreme waves in time domain and so give more realistic results. A preliminary test has been carried out. The results demonstrate the feasibility and the promising features of the proposed approach.

The sea-water that flows over a ship hull forms a turbulent boundary layer that is responsible for the skin-friction drag incurred by the ship. This boundary layer is influenced by the "roughness'' of the hull surface, which increases the drag penalty by up to 80% compared to a smooth surface in some applications. This highlights the urgent need to understand the "roughness'' effects of surface coatings and their degradation on the efficiency, economy and emissions of ship transportation. In this project, we propose a transformative approach where we tackle this pressing problem using three complementary methods. First, we will carry out Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of turbulent flow over surfaces that have been obtained from surface scans of various ship hulls. These results will be complemented by laboratory experiments and measurements in a towing tank of flows over replica of the same scanned surfaces. Finally, a DNS-Embedded Large Eddy Simulation (DELES) methodology will be developed and used to predict the influence of realistic topographies on drag.This holistic approach will provide the necessary data to gain fundamental understanding of the flows over such rough surfaces and enable development of a new data-rich paradigm for predicting the effects of roughness. We will specifically focus on maritime transport by developing a new surface-specific Moody-diagram approach that can be used by coatings manufacturers and ship operators to generate a realistic estimate of the drag penalty of coatings and fouling. This information can then be used to make operational decisions such as duration between dry-docking, quality of surface finish when in dry-dock, choice of specific coatings for specific surface finish and the variations in performance during service. This new approach can easily be extended to different sectors and new surface-specific Moody-diagrams can be developed for a whole range of applications including oil, gas and water transport pipelines, aircraft fuselage, trains, propellers etc. This project has financial support from a leading antifouling coatings manufacturer as well as collaborators at the University of Melbourne and the US Naval Academy who share our mutual interest in this research area.

Increasing international trade is leading to an explosion in the amount of shipping worldwide, which in turn is increasing the levels of noise pollution in our oceans. This is exacerbated by the large scale of the vessels used with low frequency acoustic radiation from vibrating structures propagating over long distances. The elevated noise and its detrimental impact on sea-life is a significant environmental concern. The power needed to propel such large container vessels is also leading to significant internal habitability issues with associated health and safety concerns. More generally, dwindling natural fuel reserves together with concern over greenhouse gas emissions is leading to a proliferation of offshore and land-based renewable energy generating installations. Such projects are all contributing to increasing noise pollution that in many cases radiates as infrasound (i.e. at frequencies below the threshold of human hearing) that causes unique physiological effects and discomfort in humans. In the automotive sector, similar environmental pressures are leading to lighter material construction and the increasing use of electric power. These trends lead to similar challenges for sound control and in the case of electric vehicles, this involves consideration of the unique psychological effects that cause annoyance that are not present or masked in vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. The primary vision of the work proposed here is to address the low frequency noise mitigation requirement with an ambitious programme of research aimed at the development of a range of energy efficient novel intelligent structures through the holistic combination of tools and techniques from the key distinct disciplines of active and semi-active control, fluid structure interaction, acoustic modeling, signal processing and numerical optimization and additive layer manufacture. An Intelligent Structure is defined here as a structure that integrates structural elements that encompass novel sensors, actuation including morphing materials, energy scavenging and energy storage, printed electronics, data storage, computing and communications; not only as discrete embedded devices but also printed using advanced additive manufacturing techniques. In combination the components deliver behavior and performance that satisfy multiple objectives that could include energy efficiency, fault tolerance, low noise, low vibration and light weight. The proposed partnership will be led by the Noise and Vibration Engineering Department of BAE Systems Maritime and the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research at the University of Southampton (UoS) which brings together a well-established and world leading grouping of expertise in maritime noise and vibration mitigation technologies. Working together with Lloyd's Register (LR), UoS leading expertise in fluid structure interaction and electromechanical design and the world renowned EPSRC Centre for Additive Manufacturing at the University of Nottingham this represents a formidable partnership that will deliver intelligent, energy efficient low noise structures and machines to improve the environment and enhance security and safety across a wide domain of applications.