The year 2020 was largely defined by the unprecedented disruption caused by Covid-19 pandemic, which could have lasting adverse effects on every corners of human life. In the meanwhile, the pandemic has fundamentally changed the way of how industrial enterprises operate, empowering businesses to accelerate their digital transformation and reshaping their business models. Throughout the pandemic, shipping has been essential in terms of guaranteeing the global supply chain linkage and economic interdependency. As the world moves toward recovery, the maritime industry is also stepping up to the challenge and responds to these extraordinary disruptions. Against this background, a thorough, broader, and new review of maritime businesses will be particularly important.
Traditionally, most ship hulls are optimized for ideal conditions, where the ships are sailing in calm water with full speed in full load. In the last decade, some ships have been designed for a range of draughts and speeds in calm water. However, there is still a large gap between the ideal conditions the ships are designed for and conditions (waves, wind, currents, hull roughness ets.) the ships will operate in. The target for the thesis is to develop accurate numerical models that can help ship designers narrow a part of this gap.
The main body of this thesis is three papers. The first papers compares the speed/power performance of full-scale CFD simulations, towing tank predictions, and high quality speed trial measurements from six sister vessels. Much research have been conducted comparing model- scale CFD with towing tank results. However, very few studies have compared full-scale CFD with speed trial measurements. The study includes both a ro-ro vessel and a general cargo vessel. The present study finds that including the hull and propeller roughness directly into the CFD simulations by modifying the wall-functions provides more accurate results than the traditional approach of estimating the effect of roughness using an empirical formula.
Today, most ships are designed for sailing in calm water. However, very few ships sail entirely in calm water. Before numerical simulations can be used to predict added resistance in waves and seakeeping responses, a systematic verification and validation is required to ensure the accuracy. The second paper presents such a systematic verification and validation for the KCS container ship in oblique waves. Five wave headings and six wavelengths are studied. The estimated spatial and temporal discretization errors are found by an extensive verification study to be less than 5 %. Results from the verified CFD model are compared with existing potential flow and CFD results from the literature, as well as up to three experimental data sets. The comparison shows that the present CFD results in general show significantly better agreement with the experiments than previously published CFD results.
This CFD set-up is used in the third paper to study how sailing in oblique regular waves influences the nominal wake field of the KCS ship. Five different headings are studied and the waves have a steepness of 1/60 and a wave length equal to the ship length. The present study finds that the studied incident waves make the nominal wake field highly transient. Especially the transient bilge vortex and shadow from the skeg have a significant influence on the nominal wake field. The results show that the nominal wake fraction fluctuates up to 39 % of the mean nominal wake fraction for the studied waves. The mean nominal wake fraction is higher than in calm water for all headings besides head sea waves. It is found that the stern quartering sea waves has the maximum mean nominal wake fraction, with a 16 % higher mean nominal wake fraction than in calm water. Finally the study finds that the modified advance angle on the r/R = 0.7 circle in the propeller plane varies 3.5 degrees more in stern quartering than in calm water. This increases the risk of cavitation leading to potential vibrations and loss of propulsive efficiency.
The three papers show that CFD simulations can deliver highly accuracy results, when the CFD simulations are set-up very carefully and systematic verification and validation are conducted. The results from the three papers shows that numerical simulations have a massive potential as useful tools when designing ships for the conditions, the ship will operate in.
The oceans are increasingly understood as a security space. Does the new maritime security agenda lead to new spatial configurations? This chapter introduces the concept of ‘pragmatic spaces’ to explore spatial configurations produced in responses to maritime security. Four exemplary spaces are discussed: how counter-piracy led to the development of high risk areas, how maritime security capacity building produced new regions constructed through codes of conduct, how the identification of smuggling routes established new forms of international partnerships, and how maritime domain awareness systems advance new transnational spaces of surveillance. These new spatial configurations were introduced to manage maritime security issues and enable transnational forms of governance.
This white paper shows how small and medium sized companies (SME) involved in supply chains affiliated to the maritime industry and port industrial areas are challenged by the diffusion of technologies and managerial principles associated with Industry 4.0 with a special focus on blockchain technology. Blockchain technology creates potential for added value through transparency and auditability of data flows that arise through system decentralization, where intermediary parties such as a central authority will not store data or verify transactions. Instead of conventional workflows, the technology brings new approaches to collaboration by combining multiple parties with equality of data ownership. In doing so, blockchain technology challenges conventional rules of data ownership.
While attention on blockchain technology has been increasing, most blockchain projects are still under development. However, the technology gained ground in areas such as healthcare, governance, and supply chain management. This white paper focuses on the potentials and challenges of blockchain technology in maritime related supply chains.
Based on a discussion of industry preparedness for Industry 4.0, a taxonomy of blockchain adoption is presented. The taxonomy is based on two dimensions including: (1) the digital complexity of internal activities and (2) the degree of value chain integration between actors in the supply chain. The dimensions encompass four archetypes of behavior on blockchain adoption that are applied in the following analysis.
The potential for blockchain technology is increasingly evident in supply chain logistics and manufacturing that is often located in industrial areas such as ports. By studying blockchain potentials in Danish maritime SMEs, the findings reflect the currently limited insight into blockchain technology from the point of view of business actors. As shown in the study of three Danish supply chains, containers, seafood and recirculated plastics, there are low-hanging potentials to be realized through changes to the current technologies and systems in application.
This chapter concerns the digitalization of the maritime sector with a specific focus on business models. It is the argument of the article that current research in Maritime Informatics is focused on technological optimizations and thus lacks a commercial aspect in order to grasp the importance of digitalization in the shipping sector. In order to fill this gap a business model framework is suggested in the article with focus on the level of respectively customer-based-value-propositions and land versus sea. Then follows the empirical case of the Danish shipping company Norden and the development from 2015 to 2020. Norden is a leading commercial operator of dry bulk and product tanker vessels with more than 350 vessels in operation. The conclusion of the case is that Norden so far has regarded digitalization as tool for decision taking processes, which in the long-term should lead to compete advantages in terms of more efficient decisions based on big data and advanced algorithms. The shipping company has on the other hand decided not to use digitalization for the development of new software products and in accordance to presented digitalization matrix focused on indirect value proposition for the customers rather than direct customer-based initiatives. This focus confirms the hypothesis that digitalization in the dry bulk and tanker segment will often be based on indirect value propositions while digitalization in container-shipping might have a more direct relation to specific customer-based value propositions. This distinction is linked to the business-to-business nature of dry bulk and tanker and the more mixed business to business/business to consumer nature of container shipping—in. particular when the container shipping is integrated to the value chains and thus moved closer to the ultimate customers’ preferences and services.
This PhD theis focuses on identifying the opportunities and challenges that on-board maintenance and practical operation of vessels poses in the development of autonomous ships. Inspired by the rapid development of autonomous vehicles considerable effort and interest is now invested in the development of autonomous ships. So far however, most of the research has focused on the legal aspect of unmanned vessels and on developing a system enabling a vessel to operate within the maritime collision regulation without human interaction. Specifically, the theisi looks into three research questions: (1) How is autonomous technology going to affect the workload required for operating and maintaining modern cargo vessels? (2) How is autonomous technology going to affect the operational patterns of the vessels? And (3) How is autonomous technology going to affect the reliability and utilization rate of the vessels?
The study is planned in cooperation between Svendborg International Maritime Academy (SIMAC) and University of Southern Denmark.
In 2021 DS Norden celebrated its 150 years anniversary. In this book Martin Jes Iversen is analyzing the history of the shipping company which is one of the oldest in Denmark. In the first 50 years after being founded in 1871, Norden was a pioneer firm in Danish shipping. This period was followed by five decades of financial stability and gradual stagnation. But in the early 1990s the firm started its journey to become one of the leading firms in the global dry-bulk market. As the world experienced technological, economical and political changes, Norden would also change. Some of these changes were incremental. Others were more abrupt. But they were never predictable.
This chapter provides first a discussion of how maritime security has been conceptualized and theorized and how the field has evolved. It discusses the more particular debates on dedicated maritime security issues: piracy, terrorism, smuggling, environmental crimes and the protection of critical maritime infrastructure. Although the oceans have featured occasionally in the literature on security, peace and development, it is fair to say that for decades scholars were suffering from what some have referred to as collective ‘seablindness’. A range of maritime insecurities have been extensively analysed. These include piracy; terrorism; various forms of smuggling; environmental crimes, hereunder illegal fishing; as well as a nascent literature on maritime critical infrastructures. With ongoing crises in different parts of the world’s oceans, maritime insecurity will continue to be recognized as one of the core dimensions of violence and insecurity. Maritime security also needs to be seen in the context of other international policy areas.