Countering the climate change effects with unconventional design of inland vessels

Abstract

Due to climate change, extreme navigation conditions are being increasingly encountered on inland waterways worldwide. In Europe, a sustained low-water periods have been recorded in recent years. As a consequence, the current European inland fleet is expected to experience extended periods of suspended navigation, which could disrupt the logistic chains and may result in decrease of GDP of countries relying on inland navigation, as reported. Even though it may be argued that inland vessel design is already optimized with respect to specific fairway constraints (bridge heights, lock dimensions, fairway depth, etc.), the recent low water level issues naturally govern the ship design toward the shallow-draught concepts. The paper mainly focuses on an innovative approach to design inland vessels, which implies considerable altering of main dimensions of standard vessels, i.e., a reduction of the design draught followed by an increase of ship beam. As a result of such modifications, the length-to-height ratios of the proposed novel designs exceed the applicability range of classification rules and the vessels are regarded as “unconventional” or “unusual”. Consequently, the structural design of novel vessels is to be verified by direct calculation procedures that include longitudinal strength and buckling calculations, as well as the use of finite element analysis. The paper discusses challenges in structural design of unconventional inland vessels and outlines potential benefits.