The general objective of sHYpS is to support the decarbonisation of the shipping industry, but leveraging on previous and on-going work and investment made by a specific cruise vessel owner and some consortium members. It will develop a hydrogen-based solution, which can be adapted to multiple types of vessels and in some cases can already achieve the IMO’s target for 2030 and 2050. The project will develop (i) a novel hydrogen storage intermodal 40’ ISO C-type container; (ii) the complete detailed design of module containerised power plant based on an optimised PEM fuel cell system; and (iii) the dedicated hydrogen-supply logistics. The project will define the logistics based on both the swapping of pre-filled containers and of the prospective scale-up of the storage capacity and the supply applied to a specific Norwegian port use-case. This enables the rapid implementation of the supply-chain without waiting for the full infrastructure to be in place. The project will show how this approach can support a remarkable portion of the vessels in EU waters. The project will use a window of opportunity to install the storage, gas handling and energy management systems, and a reduced power fuel cell power plant on one of the cruise vessel owner’s new-build cruise ships. The system will be tested during a shakedown cruise by 2026. Having the future full 6 MW system in place would allow a 50% reduction in carbon emissions on a 14 day fjord cruise on this vessel type, of which an ongoing new build programme is in place (as well as other types to which the system may be applicable). With the right logistics in place, the ISO container technology can be applied in hundreds of units per year. In the meantime, the elements of this project can be applied in more vessel segments at sea and on inland waterways, applicable to hundreds of vessels on the order books of commercial fleets. The value-chain includes liquid hydrogen suppliers, giving the opportunity to accelerate supply of thousands of tonnes of liquid hydrogen per year in the next twenty years.

The OCEAN project approach is to contribute to the mitigation of navigational accidents by supporting the navigators to do an even better job than they do presently. Such support does not only relate to an ‘on-the-spot’ enhancement of navigational awareness – including the presence of marine mammals and floating containers – or an improved performance of evasive manoeuvring and other mitigating actions. The project will go both deeper and wider, to identify and suggest amendments or improvements in the most pertinent factors that may contribute to events becoming accidents: training, technical, human, or organisational factors, operational constraints, processes and procedures, commercial pressures or structural issues like shortcomings in rules and regulations. From an implementation perspective, the OCEAN project will develop new design methods and operational processes, as well as integrating existing technologies to provide novel and improved functionalities. A key convergence point is the overall navigation situation assessment made by the operator, and the project aims at providing an integrated and designed-for-the-purpose presentation of near-field threats and navigational hinderances. The project outputs will include an Evasive Manoeuvring Agent, intended to work in tandem with existing ship systems, continuously assessing navigational safety with respect to grounding or collision with other ships, fixed structures or other threats, and the visualization of advanced manoeuvring prediction. OCEAN will suggest the creation of a European Navigational Hazard infrastructure to collect, process and distribute data relating to the presence of marine mammals and floating containers. Further innovations comprise input to upcoming and revised international standards for maritime communications and practical methods to design maritime instruments and devices, all of which will be demonstrated in consolidated scenarios.

Many offshore structures for exploiting oil/gas in ocean and for harnessing marine renewable wave energy, tidal current energy and offshore wind energy have been and will be designed and operated. During the design of these structures, it is essential to consider their responses in the worst situation possibly met(extreme sea). In such situation, the breaking wave impact and the viscous effects are widely recognized to be important. These factors disqualified the well-established linear or second-order wave diffraction analysis based in the frequency domain which has been usually used during the design. However, the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools with ability to model the wave impact and viscously may take several days or weeks to produce reliable results for the response of structures in a required large sea area with dimensions at the level of tens or hundreds of wavelengths in 3-D and for many wave periods. Alternative tools based on the fully nonlinear potential theory (FNPT) have relatively higher computational efficiency, e.g. the Quasi Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian Finite Element method (QALE-FEM) may complete the simulation within an overnight. However, they cannot deal with the breaking wave impact and take the viscous/ effects into account. Therefore, how to efficiently model viscosity/turbulence and the breaking wave impact associated with wave-structure interaction remains to be a key challenge in offshore and marine engineering. This project will carry out the research to tackle the challenge by developing a novel approach to efficiently model the interaction between large-domain 3D extreme waves and the offshore structures with consideration of viscous/turbulent effects and breaking wave impact. The new method takes the advantage of the CFD tools and the FNPT based methods by integrating them in a single approach. It is expected to have the computational efficiency at a similar level to the FNPT based QALE-FEM , i.e. simulating wave-structure interaction with viscosity and wave breaking in a required large 3D sea area on modern PCs within an overnight. The new development may make it possible to simulate large floating structures subjected to extreme waves in time domain and so give more realistic results. A preliminary test has been carried out. The results demonstrate the feasibility and the promising features of the proposed approach.

The European ship fleet counts 23,000 vessels, accounting for the 40% of the global gross tonnage. Marine industry is a major prosperity engine of the EU contributing a total of €147bn to the GDP and supporting more than 1.7m jobs. However, the vessels’ structural integrity verification is a major issue for the shipping industry. Regulations dictate that Non Destructive Testing (NDT) inspections should be performed every 5 years for the first decade of a vessel’s life and every 2.5 years thereafter. Ship hull weld inspection is a challenging process as safety-critical welds length exceeds 120km in large vessels and involves human inspectors on site using scaffolding or cherry-pickers. These procedures require long periods of dry-docking incurring loss of revenue and costs amounting to more than €150k per inspection. Moreover conventional ultrasonic techniques cannot be applied on metal plates of thickness <10mm, which are commonly used nowadays to reduce ship weight. This necessitates the use of dangerous radiographic techniques posing health and safety issues. These challenges give rise to a unique business opportunity which Spectrum Labs and Tecnitest (leading NDT equipment and service providers) along with Innora (dynamic high-tech company specializing in robotics) and TWI (global leader in NDT technology) aspire to seize with the help of Lloyds’ Register, the most reputable shipping service provider with 230 years of experience. We aim to redefine ship NDT inspection by commercializing ShipTest, a laser-guided robotic crawler able to automatically track the weld and inspect the hull while the ship is at sea. Through a combination of bleeding-edge ultrasonic and electromagnetic techniques ShipTest can accurately inspect metal plates of <10mm thickness eliminating the need for radiography. By commercialising ShipTest we will grow our businesses by €47.7m, cumulatively over 5 years, generating €19.04m in profits and creating 398 direct jobs and 1185 indirect jobs

<< Background >>CLLAIM project is to create an International AM qualification body and to design an International harmonized qualification system and respective qualifications according to AM market needs, due to a relevant and unpredictable growing future in AM and because of that, job positions are very hard to fill with current training and a shortage of qualified workers in AM technology that can meet the expected high levels of demand for high-performance products.<< Objectives >>Training qualifications developed during the project that were identified as more relevant during consultation with industry are totally aligned with EU tools, and thereforewith EQF levels and ESCO taxonomy, with total alignment with the upcoming standards for the qualification of AM personnel, development of a pedagogical kit for the exchange of best practices between IAMQS training providers. Feedback loops towards a continuous improvement of project results ensuring good impact in industry.<< Implementation >>The qualifications and guidelines were developed in accordance with EU tools to facilitate their integration and implementation, both at national and international levels. To this end, pilot activities were conducted to test the developed qualifications, RPL methodology and tools, which resulted in a positive validation of the system developed during the project and implementation of a cluster meeting with National Qualification Agencies to foster the integration of the qualifications.<< Results >>Development of harmonised of AM training /qualifications (Operator, Designer, Supervisor and Inspector in AM) supported by a Quality Assurance System led to the creation of an innovative International AM Qualification System (IAMQS). RPL and LO´s methodology and including CLLAIM qualifications in National Qualification Frameworks was initiated. Development of Mainstreaming Committee to ensure that the guidelines and qualifications developed in CLLAIM are continuously actualized.