In order to improve the survival capability of passenger and ro-ro ships in event of fire or flooding, in the last few years a set of international Regulations has been issued. In particular, the Regulation SOLAS "Safe Return to Port" is addressed towards design criteria able to guarantee adequate functionality of the ship when a casualty occurs. The Regulation requires the evacuation of the ship when a given threshold of damage (i.e., fire and flood) is exceeded. The evacuation analysis has become of primary importance even in the early-stage design. Indeed, the new amendments to SOLAS Regulation II-2/13.3.2.7 makes the evacuation analysis mandatory for both new and existing passenger and ro-ro ships since the early steps of the project. In this paper, the current IMO Guidelines have been analysed, and a case study for the evacuation of a 3600-person cruise ship has been carried out by means of both a simplified and an advanced method. To perform advanced calculations, two different software, based on virtual reality, have been used and the results have been compared with simplified method ones.

The continuous increasing attention to environmental sustainability and air pollution reduction for transport systems, requires not only to adopt new technologies and innovative solutions to limit vehicles emissions, but also to study their life-cycle. In case of inland navigation, the operation close to urban areas or in natural protected environments requires the adoption of a green propulsion. Moreover, especially for small crafts, the problem of ship disposal at the end of life is of high importance, even once plastic materials should be disposed, due to high costs and process complexities. For such a reason the design of a new generation green passenger craft requires the analysis and knowledge of multiple engineering fields, that could lead to a fast and successful design only by means of an integrated approach. In the present work, this approach will be applied to the design of a passenger craft, adopting an hybrid electric powering system and build with strip planking process for wooden ships. The description of the construction process will be here described together with the on-board electric power system. The integrated approach allowed also to directly evaluate the vessel operative profile and asses whether the vessel could perform a Zero Emission Mode navigation.

No abstract

Metallic alloys play the leading role in marine engine construction. Yet, under the compelling goal of reducing cost and weights, this industrial sector is in constant need of new, high-performance materials for the production of marine engine non-structural components. In this respect, nano-engineered thermoplastic polymers are ideal alternatives, allowing for additional benefits (e.g., simplified maintenance and inspection operations). The use of these materials in marine engine design requires computer multiscale simulations to tailor-fit their molecular structure in order to achieve the expected performances required by specific, advanced functions. Importantly, replacing metal alloys with plastic-based materials also contributes to environmental sustainability, in terms of both component production process and recyclability. The introduction of non-structural plastic components in marine engines constitutes a major innovation in the field; thus, a specific rule framework must be still defined. Under this perspective, starting from the analysis of the rule framework currently used for metallic alloys, in this paper a certification procedure is proposed and applied to a case study: a four-stroke marine engine plastic cylinder head cover for which the mechanical properties of the new material have been predicted and verified trough multiscale simulations carried out on the relevant model.