Meyer Werft is one of the major German shipyards, headquartered in Papenburg at the river Ems. Founded in 1795 and starting with small wooden vessels, today Meyer Werft is a builder of luxury passenger ships. 700 ships of different types have been built at the yard. Its "Dockhalle 2" is the third largest shipbuilding hall and the building with the fourth-largest usable volume in the world.Meyer Werft has been owned and managed by the Meyer family for seven generations. Since 1997, it has been part of the Meyer Neptun Group, together with Neptun Werft in Rostock. In 2014, the company added the Turku shipyard in Finland to the group.The shipyard is an anchor on the European Route of Industrial Heritage.
A blind full-scale CFD resistance prediction workshop was held in 2024, with the Lucy Ashton paddle steamer as its test case. Results from forty participants were received for the three different parts in which the workshop was organised, which consisted of a grid refinement study with common grids, full-scale simulations for varying Froude number, and model-scale simulations at a constant Froude number for varying model sizes. This paper presents a summary of the results gathered for the workshop along with its main findings, and the comparison with the results available from the experimental campaign carried out for the Lucy Ashton in the 1950s. The computational results led to lower ship resistance than the experimental data for all conditions, due to the simulations considering the ship to be hydrodynamically smooth and to not heave or pitch. The scatter of the resistance at full-scale showed a decreasing trend as the Froude number was increased with a median absolute deviation of at most 2.3 %. The spread in the numerical results obtained for the full-scale conditions was equivalent to that observed for the model-scale cases, building further confidence in full-scale CFD.
This paper reports on lessons learned during the design of the vessels, including the risk assessments; during the actual build/retrofit; and during the vessels' operation. The focus is on the gained knowledge, to serve as proofs of concept and as a starting point for other methanol vessel conversions.
