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New, Advanced and Value-Added Innovative Ships

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - NAVAIS (New, Advanced and Value-Added Innovative Ships)

Reporting period: 2021-06-01 to 2022-05-31

The European maritime technology sector generates an annual turnover of € 112.5 billion and creates more than 500,000 direct jobs and more than 400,000 indirect jobs, primarily for European citizens. However, worldwide competition is fierce, and in order to maintain world-leadership in complex, value-added and highly specialised vessels European shipbuilders must develop tailor-made innovative concepts that are efficient to design and build. NAVAIS has developed a platform-based modular product family approach supported by the 3DEXPERIENCE® integrated business platform. If implemented, these methods will increase efficiency in vessel design and flexibility in production networks.

The NAVAIS innovative solution is the adoption of platform-based product family and modular product architecture principles for passenger & road ferries and for workboats. The NAVAIS concept is expected to result in 30 % higher efficiency in ship design development, production lead-times and cost, reduction of testing and approval times for customised vessels and reduction of rework during the warranty period. While the results achieved at the end of the NAVAIS project support this estimate, the demonstration of these savings in an operational environment will depend on the implementation after the project.

3 main project objectives have been defined:
1. Define platform based design & production practices for ferries and workboat product families;
2. Create digital demonstrators for an Electrical powered passenger/road ferry and work boat equipped for aqua culture;
3. Incorporate "low environmental impact" and low energy consumption aspects;

All main objectives have been reached, through achieving in the key results listed below:
Objective 1:
KR1: Modularisation principles for platform-based ship-product family designs, established and validated in the demonstrator designs;
KR2: A module library (database) for passenger/road ferries and multi-use workboats which was established and which content was used in the demonstrator designs;
KR3: A system engineering-based modular design procedure, which was established and validated in the demonstrator designs;
KR4: A modular production method, which was established and (partially) validated in the demonstrator designs;

Objective 2:
KR5&6: TRL-9 rated digital twins of modular low-impact E-ferry design and modular multi-use workboat equipped for aqua culture, which were demonstrated can be created with the tools developed under KR1-4.

Objective 3:
KR7: Low impact and low energy and emissions design/operations principles were established and links with the design tools were created to integrate the developed
KR8: Validated Underwater Radiated Noise (URN) prediction tools for highly loaded propellers were developed and links with the design software platform demonstrated.
In the final period, work focussed on the following main topics:
- Completion of the demonstrator designs & production method analysis applied to these designs;
- Finalized the URN tooling for propeller and machinery induced noise and demonstrating the feasibility of connecting this tooling to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform;
- Validation of the user stories and use cases incorporated in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform with feedback from the demonstrator design.
- Involvement of the (SME) supply chain through workshops and dissemination activities;

Dissemination
During the second period WP6 started a social media campaign to strengthen the dissemination of the project. The campaign consisted in realizing a series of mini-videos in which the objectives and the different work packages of the project were explained. Furthermore, NAVAIS excecuted a gender campaign with the goal of involving more women in the project.To achieve this goal, three videos of women working in the project were produced and published on the NAVAIS LinkedIn page.
As part of attracting SME's to the NAVAIS project two workshops for supply chain partners were given. These workshops were also used to receive feedback on the intermediate results of NAVAIS. Other dissemination activities included a presentation at Shipbuilding & Lifecycle Tech 4.0 conference by DSGo, an in-depth interview on the results and impact of NAVAIS, published in the NMT Magazine (hardcopy). A collaboration of DS and BV resulted in a paper at the Compit'2022 Italy. All the dissemination activities are closed off with the Final conference in Rotterdam.

Exploitation
The exploitable results are categorized in three main categories; Methodologies, Software applications and Products. The key success factors of NAVAIS ‘low impact’ and ‘Platform-based modular product family’ are intertwined in these categories.
- Methodologies include the contextually applied MBSE method, module library, modular pre-approval process, the modular production planning methodology, Module planning under uncertainty, Optimal module selection, URN-tool, SEECAT V2.0 and TESTER.
- Software applications include the MBSE methodology, applied using 3DX, for which specialised integrations have been developed.
- Products include low-impact modular designed e-ferry, low-impact modular designed workboat, automated vessel charging connector, Algorithm for fast battery charging and a Modular megawatt charger.
The key results achieved in the course of the project have been summarised above. These lead to the following (potential) impacts after the project:

Platform based product family design: The developed modular standardised multi-use workboat concepts will bring the NAVAIS partnership to an increased level of competitiveness.

Low impact modular ferries: The NAVAIS developed modular-based design for hull, deckhouses, power pack and propulsion train will be scalable and allow for future retrofitting.

Low impact multi-use workboats: NAVAIS has developed a family of multi-use vessels in the range below 500 GT employable on worldwide offshore locations. The vessel family employs a basic scalable platform concept and functions (power/ propulsion trains, DP, hotel, HVAC, navigation, lifting equipment etc.) that can be outfitted for specific services such as firefighting, oil spills and other floating pollution (plastic soup). 

Class pre-approval of pre-engineered modules: The advantages of direct 3D digital classification include: reducing shipyard workload with fewer drawings to create, improving quality and enabling a common understanding of design and class comments by using the digital twin directly, and optimizing the calculation process by directly interfacing the 3D model with all calculation software such as structural and stability software.

Low environmental impact issues: NAVAIS has developed low impact design guidelines and KPI’s for passenger/road ferries and multi-use workboats operational requirements. These guidelines can be used in an early design stage to achieve the required low-impact characteristics with an optimum selection from the available design options, at limited project specific design/engineering effort.

Under water radiated noise: NAVAIS has developed and validated by model tests URN-predicting tools for non-stationary conditions to optimise propeller design, which can be used in the development various ship types, including, but not limited to workboats and ferries. This allows a more accurate prediction of URN in an early design stage.

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