Chapter 9 - Ship design, construction and operation

Abstract

This Chapter provides a broad overview of ship design, construction and operation. The ship design process may be broken down broadly into two stages: Conceptual and/or preliminary design and detailed or tender or contract design. The preliminary design process will normally take the form of a techno-economic appraisal, using a fundamental engineering economy approach. The ship owner's operational requirements need to be established during preliminary designing, which then allows the development of a basic specification such as deadweight, speed, range, capacity, stability, and freeboard. The chapter further discusses the principal materials used in the construction of the main components of a ship or marine structure, including steels, aluminum alloys and composites, the effects of corrosion, corrosion control, and antifouling. It outlines typical examples of ship structure, shipyard layout and shipbuilding process is given, together with a description of the links between the design, drawing and manufacturing process. Most design problems may be formulated as follows: determine a set of design variables (e.g. number of ships, individual ship size and speed in fleet optimization; main dimensions and interior subdivision of ship; scantlings of a construction; characteristic values of pipes and pumps in a pipe net) subject to certain relations between and restrictions of these variables (e.g. by physical, technical, legal, economical laws). If more than one combination of design variables satisfies all these conditions, we would like to determine that combination of design variables which optimizes some measure of merit (e.g. weight, cost, or yield).