The Germanischer Lloyd SE was a classification society based in the city of Hamburg, Germany. It ceased to exist as an independent entity in September 2013 as a result of its merger with Norway's DNV (Det Norske Veritas) to become DNV GL.Before the merger, as a technical supervisory organization, Germanischer Lloyd conducted safety surveys on more than 7,000 ships with over 100 Mio GT. Its technical and engineering services also included the mitigation of risks and assurance of technical compliance for oil, gas, and industrial installations, as well as wind energy parks..
AbstractShip design and production activities are strongly driven by a very competitive environment as well as a reduction of time to market. The use of computer tools is thus strongly needed but is subject to many constraints. This article aims to provide the reader with a global view of this topic.
A new simulation environment named SoFiA for the Solar Field Assessment for Central Receiver Systems (CRS) has been developed. CRS technology entails a higher degree of complexity in analysis and design relative to other CSP technologies. SoFiA approaches these difficulties in a staged way with different quality levels. For the techno-economic plant optimization and preliminary annual energy yield calculations a medium quality model is chosen for the optical, thermal and electrical calculations; this serves to decrease program runtime and allows for the simulation of many plant configurations until an optimum for the Figure of Merit is found. In a second phase the soundness of the most promising plant configurations are validated with a high quality simulation model. This model consists of various modules, including a Monte-Carlo ray-tracing approach. Thermal and hydraulic modeling of the receiver and power block is simulated with a dynamic physical model with flexible time steps. Regarding the heliostat positioning, a series of state-of-the-art algorithms have been implemented and optimized, such as Radial Staggern with Slip Planes, continuous Radial Staggern and Biomimetic variations. The actual site topography can be imported and is considered during the optimization. Other features include dynamic Sunshape profiles and site adapted atmospheric attenuation functions. The Levelized Cost of Electricity was selected as the Figure of Merit. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/)
In the North Sea, an array of wind profiling wind lidars were deployed mainly on offshore platforms. The purpose was to observe free stream winds at hub height. Eight lidars were validated prior to offshore deployment with observations from cup anemometers at 60, 80, 100 and 116 m on an onshore met mast situated in flat terrain. The so-called “NORSEWInD standard” for comparing lidar and mast wind data includes the criteria that the slope of the linear regression should lie within 0.98 and 1.01 and the linear correlation coefficient higher than 0.98 for the wind speed range 4–16 m∙s−1. Five lidars performed excellently, two slightly failed the first criterion and one failed both. The lidars were operated offshore from six months to more than two years and observed in total 107 months of 10-min mean wind profile observations. Four lidars were re-evaluated post deployment with excellent results. The flow distortion around platforms was examined using wind tunnel experiments and computational fluid dynamics and it was found that at 100 m height wind observations by the lidars were not significantly influenced by flow distortion. Observations of the vertical wind profile shear exponent at hub height are presented.
The present study focuses on a comprehensive analysis of recorded accidents of medium and large oil tankers (deadweight over 20,000 tonnes), which occurred after the introduction of OPA90 and until today. Raw casualty data was reviewed and re-analysed in order to produce appropriate statistics useful for the implementation of risk-based assessment methodologies. The main outcome of the presented study is the identification of significant historical trends and of quantitative characteristics of individual categories of tanker accidents, like overall accidental frequencies per ship year, frequencies of each major accident category and per tanker ship size, ship type/design and age, the degree of accidents’ severity and the oil spill tonne rates per ship year. Therefore this study is a valuable source of information for the assessment of the effectiveness of current IMO regulations, classification society rules and tanker industry’s practice. JEL Classifications: L9. Keywords: Tanker casualties; marine oil pollution; risk analysis and assessment; tanker hull design.
The new probabilistic damaged stability regulations for dry cargo and passenger ships (SOLAS 2009), which entered into force on January 1, 2009, represent a major step forward in achieving an improved safety standard through the rationalization and harmonization of damaged stability requirements. There are, however, serious concerns regarding the adopted formulation for the calculation of the survival probability of passenger ships and the associated required subdivision indices, particularly for RoPax and large cruise ships. The present paper outlines the objectives, the methodology of work and main results of the EU-funded FP7 project GOALDS (Goal Based Damage Stability, 2009-2012), which aims to address the above shortcomings by formulating a new rational, goalbased regulatory framework, properly accounting for the damage stability properties of passenger ships and the risk to people onboard.
