Ship energy efficiency technologies: Now and the future

Ship energy efficiency has recently become essential and crucial to the global shipping industries due to strict regulations, increasing operation cost and fierce competition. New technologies and innovative solutions have been widely applied to ship designing, building, retrofitting and operation processes in the last decades, which, however, rarely result in expected energy efficiency improvements in practice due to lack of system-level consideration under real operating conditions. How to assure the new technologies and solutions to achieve the desired performances at a ship level is still a big challenge. This book showcases some R&D practices and methodologies as a joint effort to address the challenge by a Finnish consortium consisting of four renowned Finnish companies and two top-level Finnish research institutions in the marine industries. Following a forward-looking (now - next step - future) approach, the special focuses of the book are on 1) reviewing and investigating the potential of novel energy efficiency technologies currently adopted or available in the marine industries, 2) how to use energy saving technologies to improve ship energy efficiency, especially for the case ships, and 3) to seek new innovative methods for better design and operate the next-generation ship energy systems. The holistic analysis and optimization methods target not only at instant improvements of ship energy efficiency but more importantly at long-term potential for optimal energy efficient ship solutions. As the final report of the R&D consortium, this book is a collection of some selected work of the projects, which aims to demonstrate the potential of different technologies and methods for improving ship energy efficiency and to offer a sneak peek at the future trend towards smart and green shipping.