Concern for the structural assessment of ship and offshore structures during operations, including unmanned operations. The focus shall be on methodologies translating monitoring and inspection data into operational and life-cycle management advice, with associated criteria for decision making. This shall include diagnosis and prognosis of structural health, prevention of structural degradation and failures, and structural renewal and reuse. The research and development in passive, latent and active systems including their sensors and actuators shall be addressed. Special attention is to be given to structural digital twin technology and methods including reduced order analysis, inverse modelling, and AI technology application, combined with the use of monitoring systems and inspection data, to provide real-time advice for safe operation during the structural life-cycle.
Concern for the overall design process for ships and offshore structural safety and performance, including unmanned, and its integration with production, maintenance and repair. The development of appropriate principles for rational life-cycle design using general sustainability criteria in economic, societal and environmental terms shall be addressed. Particular attention shall be given to the roles and requirements of computer-based design and production, and to the utilization of information technology. Possible differences with the safety requirements in existing standards within the regulatory frameworks, including comparisons with other relevant industries and Goal-Based Standards, shall be considered. The role of reliability-based design codes and requirements shall be treated as well as their calibration to established safety levels.
Inclined plates equipped with nozzle systems for wall cooling and cleaning are employed in a wide range of industrial applications, including the metallurgical, nuclear, energy, and marine sectors. Although jet-based cooling has been widely investigated, detailed multiphase simulations are often computationally expensive and difficult to validate experimentally. In this context, a detailed investigation of the thermo-fluid dynamic behavior of the jet distribution, impact, and plate cooling process is essential. In this study, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations were performed to accurately capture the physics of the problem and realistically predict the resulting flow and heat transfer phenomena. The aim of this work is twofold: first, to analyze in detail different physical modeling approaches, ranging from a simplified one-dimensional model to a more compact and comprehensive one that accounts for jet dynamics; second, to compare the obtained results to assess the robustness of an intermediate model representing the optimal trade-off between computational cost and accuracy. Finally, the numerical predictions were validated against experimental data, showing maximum temperature deviations below 1.31 degrees C and mean absolute errors lower than 0.79 degrees C. This demonstrates that a simplified CFD approach can reliably reproduce the thermal behavior of more complex multiphase models while significantly reducing the computational cost. This contribution provides a validated and efficient methodology for thermal analysis and design of jet-cooled inclined surfaces at engineering scale.
Concern for the application of offshore structures for ocean space utilization purposes, such as VLFS, seabed mining and offshore aquaculture structures. Focus should be given to fluid-structure interaction induced by the large size, seabed bathymetry and structure flexibility. Due consideration should be given to the comparison of simple and more refined theories to determine the dynamic response of structures with connectors, mooring systems, etc. The engineering applicability should be discussed based on available tank testing and full-scale measurements in the actual engineering structures. General requirements, interpretations and standards used in the design for safety, reliability and serviceability of the offshore structures for different ocean space utilization purposes shall be discussed.
In this work, we focus on the early design phase of cruise ship hulls, where the designers are tasked with ensuring the structural resilience of the ship against extreme waves while reducing steel usage and respecting safety and manufacturing constraints. At this stage the geometry of the ship is already finalized and the designer choose the thickness of the primary structural elements, such as decks, bulkheads, and the shell. Reduced order modeling and black-box optimization techniques reduce the use of expensive finite element analysis to only validate the most promising configurations, thanks to the efficient exploration of the domain of decision variables. However, the quality of the final results heavily relies on the problem formulation, and on how the structural elements are assigned to the decision variables. With the increased request for alternative fuels and engine technologies, the designers are often faced with novel configurations and risk producing ill-suited parameterizations. To address this issue, we enhanced a structural optimization pipeline for cruise ships developed in collaboration with Fincantieri S.p.A. with a novel data-driven hierarchical reparameterization procedure, based on the optimization of a series of sub-problems. Moreover, we implemented a multi-objective optimization module to provide the designers with insights into the efficient trade-offs between competing quantities of interest and enhanced the single-objective Bayesian optimization module. The new pipeline is tested on a simplified midship section and a full ship hull, comparing the automated reparameterization to a baseline model provided by the designers. The tests show that the iterative refinement outperforms the baseline, thus streamlining the initial design phase and helping tackle more innovative projects.
