New ‘Digital’ Toolbox Makes Sustainable Ship Design Concepts, Cutting Hull Optimisation Time from Weeks To Days

Deltamarin has worked continuously to develop new methods for ship concept design and a digital “toolbox” to enable energy-efficient and sustainable vessel designs. Hydrodynamic optimization is one of Deltamarin’s current development areas, and the company is advancing its capabilities in this field through cooperation with Nocean, including the integration of Nocean’s optimization tool and related know-how.

While Deltamarin has demonstrated for decades its ability to generate excellent hulls, numerical optimization provides an important complement to expert knowledge. It can help with:

• Finding non-intuitive improvements that can be difficult to identify through human expertise alone
• Handling complex multi-condition objectives, such as operational profiles involving multiple draughts and speeds
• Dramatically expanding the design space that can practically be explored during the concept design process – typically hundreds of qualified simulations with various parameter combinations.

The cooperation with Nocean began with a real project involving a large PCTC vessel, where the starting point for the optimization was already a state-of-the-art, highly efficient hull. The case was complex, with nine operating conditions covering three draughts and three speeds, where optimal performance needed to be determined. Deltamarin had previously carried out the hull optimization internally based on human expertise alone, with the work taking several weeks. Nocean demonstrated that its tool was able to identify similar improvements in approximately four to five days. The weighted average of the improvements reached 8% in this case.

Following the successful start of the cooperation and work on several projects, such as a tanker, a twin-skeg LNG carrier and a cruise vessel, Deltamarin saw continued collaboration with Nocean as the natural and most promising way forward. The Nocean tool and related know-how provide a platform for further developing Deltamarin’s concept design methods and integrating hydrodynamic optimization into its existing CFD modelling practices.

“What makes this collaboration particularly exciting is the combination of Deltamarin’s extensive ship design and hydrodynamic expertise with our optimization technology. The objective is not simply to optimize an existing hull, but to give designers the ability to explore a much wider design space across complex operational profiles, while fundamental design decisions are still open. By making this exploration possible within days rather than weeks, optimization can become an integral part of concept design and help identify efficiency gains that would otherwise be extremely difficult to uncover,” says Ivan Schrooyen, Founder and CEO of Nocean.

“For Deltamarin, this hydrodynamic optimization enables us to shift informed, data-based decision-making to an earlier stage of the concept project, when it is still possible to influence key ship design decisions – from main dimensions to various other hard points driven by alternative fuels, for instance. This means that instead of only chasing the last few % we can gain in hull performance, we can identify larger opportunities for improvement, leading to savings of tens of percent in ship concept fuel efficiency,” says Mia Elg, R&D Manager at Deltamarin.

The practical impact of combining advanced numerical optimization with Deltamarin’s hydrodynamic and ship design expertise is that Deltamarin can create fundamentally more energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable designs for our customers. The reduced design time allows more variations to be studied, leading to more informed, data-based decision-making early in vessel development, when key design parameters can still be influenced.

Deltamarin is a leading ship designer capable of developing bespoke designs across maritime and offshore markets, with successful concept design as one of its key competencies.

Nocean is a Norwegian engineering company specialized in software and services related to advanced ship hydrodynamics and hull optimization.