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Content archived on 2024-05-29

Sustainable methods for optimal design and operation of ships with air-lubricated hulls

Objective

The strategic objective of SMOOTH is to cover all aspects of air-lubricated ships still requiring research and assessment to enable the technology transfer of air-lubrication into daily European shipbuilding and operation practice of both inland and coastal navigating ships. The PELS project, a Dutch national project, demonstrated a positive overall energy win is achieved in all operational conditions of a ship when air lubrication is applied. Based on these findings, the SMOOTH consortium estimates that ship efficiency improvements up to 20% will be feasible. The consortium of SMOOTH consists of leading European research institutes and industrial partners from seven different European countries, each of them with unique skills, either as knowledge providers, top hydrodynamic labs and universities, end-users or air-system and maritime paint suppliers, to contribute to the successful implementation of air-lubricated ships. SMOOTH aims at a considerable reduction of fuel consumption, CO2 discharge with at the same time improved safety by applying new, vanguard technologies. The application of this promising technique will strengthen the position of European shipbuilders compared to their Asian competitors. Two important factors in ship safety are manoeuvring and stopping performance. As with air-lubricated ships frictional resistance of a ship can be influenced by switching on and off the air-lubrication, the stopping performance of ships can be improved noticeably. For example in cases when there is danger of collisions and groundings,sometimes leading to severe environmental pollutions. Besides the global dissemination of results, controlled dissemination of sensitive project results is enabled by the installation of a Supervisory Board, supporting the control of the running project by interested end-users and being exclusively legitimated to receive the results of the research.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.

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Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

FP6-2005-TRANSPORT-4
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Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

STREP - Specific Targeted Research Project

Coordinator

MARITIME RESEARCH INSTITUTE NETHERLANDS
EU contribution
No data
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

No data

Participants (10)

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