Spatio-temporal modelling of MetOcean environment for safe and energy efficient maritime transport

Research Project, 2018 – 2019

Due to the increased awareness of air emissions and economic impact from energy consumption in shipping, as well as stricter environmental regulations, the maritime community is seeking for solutions to increase energy efficiency. Furthermore, the climate targets set up by EU and Sweden require that at least 10% of the transport fuels should come from renewable sources by 2020. Since most of a ship’s service time is sailing at sea, developing energy
efficiency measures in shipping must rely on a deeper fundamental understanding of the random nature of sea environment, its interaction phenomena with ship structures, as well as reliable methods to analyse the efficiency and safety of marine energy performances. This collaboration project will gather competences from sea environment observations, marine technology, and mathematical modelling at both Chalmers and Osaka University, and their surrounding maritime clusters. The objective is to develop full-time range sea environment models, which can describe and simulate the random nature and correlation structure of wind and wave conditions at both spatial and temporal regions. Several demonstration cases and virtual collaboration/dissemination platform will be created to promote the utilization of the sea environmental models for the development of innovative measures, such as ship
weather routing plan, auxiliary wind propulsion technologies, etc., to promote safe and efficient maritime transport. Scientifically, the collaboration will increase our international research reputation on random sea environment modelling and application. Practically, it is also expected to build a communication bridge between maritime clusters for R&I in East Asia and VGR.