First dedicated international conference to disseminate the activities of the FASTPOD project and bring the advances in the technology to a public audience.
The last decade has been witnessing a growing uptake of integrated electric driven pod propulsion units. Since their commercial introduction in the early 1990s their range of application, capacity and type of unit has increased tremendously. In recognition of this the European Commission has supported a number of large collaborative research and development projects in relation to pod technologies. Further in this last meeting, the International Towing Tank Conference (ITTC) established a specialist committee on Azimuthing Pod Propulsion, to review, over the next three years the procedures for testing, extrapolation as well as other issues including off design loads, stability and impact on IMO criteria.
In spite of the above activities there had been no focused international event to discuss the past, present and future of pod propulsion. It was therefore timely to gather together pod manufacturers, shipyards, operators, designers, test facilities, classification societies, regulatory authorities, researchers and other interested parties to discuss and disseminate advances in pod propulsion technology.
T-POD provided a platform for this discussion and will serve to disseminate the activities within the Fifth Framework Projects sponsored by the EC Framework Programme (FP5).