Ship route optimization to enable the just-in-time arrival at a port

• Main Author: Haziq Bin Mudzzaffar
• Other Authors: Liu Shukui
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Engineering::Mechanical engineering::Fluid mechanics; Engineering::Mechanical engineering::Mechanics and dynamics
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/168436
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With the era of Industrial 4.0 revolution and globalization, we can ship products across the world. Before the modern era, ships carrying cargo takes weeks – or even months to travel from one continent to another, always needing many crew members on board the ships and many lives were lost during the voyages as there are no predictions of weather and all they had were the sails and labor as their engine. Now, we can transport even more bulky items, and the volume of goods has increased exponentially. The ships now are specialized in their own forms – whether they are tankers, bulk carriers, or even leisure vessels. Ships in the modern era are powered by propellers coupled with a steam engine, then they move on to diesel and petrol engines. Each engine which are paired with a particular propeller has a specialized purpose – some are used for slow speed, such as tankers and containerships, while others require high speeds which are used for military purposes such as frigates and are designed for fast transportation during warfare or peace-keeping. In this project, several programs would be utilized to perform analysis, to generate the boundary layers of the specified vessel, and to tabulate the wave resistance in conjunction with a specified velocity. Applications used in this report are – XFOIL developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Python, an open-source coding software which is applicable in calculating mathematics equations. The strengths and limitations of these programs would then be discussed later in this report.