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| From Technology Review, July 1995 The Swiftest Ship in the Shipping Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . By David Brittan THE FASTSHIP, a jet-powered cargo vessel being proposed for service between the United States and Europe, may be the Barbra Streisand of transoceanic shipping: it packs a lot of power, has a distinctive prow, and slices through those high seas "like buttah." If it also had the entertainer's proven track record, its developers wouldn't need MIT's help. But as it happens, FastShip Atlantic, Inc., of Alexandria, Va., is attempting to forge a whole new transportation market using technology never before applied in large ships. To improve its chances of success, the company has enlisted MIT's Department of Ocean Engineering and Center for Transportation Studies, to both evaluate the vessel's design and test the market for high-speed shipping. As the name implies, the essence of the FastShip concept is speed. The vessel, once built, will cruise at 42 knots (48 mph)—roughly twice the rate of conventional freighters—cutting the transatlantic crossing from seven or eight days to three and a half. The key to this improvement is the ship's "semi-planing" hull. While the stern of an ordinary ship drives deeper into the water as the speed rises, the FastShip's stern is wide and shallow, with a hydrodynamic curve that lifts it partway out of the sea at high speeds. The hull design also calls for a deep, V-shaped bow that can plow through 50-foot waves under full steam. Mariners have a name for this ability to maintain poise in rough waters: seakeeping. According to Paul Sclavounos, an MIT professor of ocean engineering who has finished a preliminary analysis of the FastShip's hydrodynamics, it is seakeeping that sets the vessel apart from other large freighters. "In the severe sea states we've looked at so far—with wave heights of 6 meters—this design seems to experience only about a 5 percent increase in resistance, which is a very low number." The hull shape behind those figures is not new. FastShip Atlantic is licensing the patent from the British marine engineering firm Thornycroft, Giles and Co., whose design has been used in smaller naval and passenger vessels (less than 200 feet long) since the 1960s. But FastShip Atlantic intends to scale up the design for freighters ranging from 560 to at least 860 feet in length. The massive vessels will be pushed hard. Six to eight gas turbines—jumbo-jet engines specially modified by General Electric—will drive five water jets, which work on the principle of a jet ski, moving large volumes of water to propel the vessel. Like semi-planing hulls, jet propulsion has yet to be tried on large ships. Another innovation is rapid cargo handling. Containerized goods will glide onto and off the ship on large metal pallets buoyed by a cushion of air. A train of pallets will be pulled by a single tractor. According to FastShip Atlantic, this system, which it calls Alicon, will enable stevedores to load and unload cargoes in four to six hours instead of one to two days. The company's overall goal is to shorten door-to-door delivery times for goods from the typical 14–35 days to 5. Speedy Delivery What kinds of exports would benefit from a delivery time of five days? "Lots of exports," says Robert Simpson, a professor in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics who is heading the market feasibility study (and whose earlier research on air cargo led to his broader interest in freight). An obvious prospect is cars. Time spent waiting on docks and in transit is costly to automakers, says Simpson. Volvo is so eager to cut its delivery times that it is helping FastShip Atlantic set up service between Gothenburg, Sweden, and the transatlantic hub port of Zeebrugge, Belgium. FastShip Atlantic expects to have a 560-foot vessel built and operating on that route by the end of 1996. In 1998, when—if all goes as scheduled—the shipping company will start running four 863-foot vessels between Zeebrugge and Philadelphia, Volvo plans to have its cars on board. Simpson says U.S. automakers have also expressed interest in the FastShip line. Since January, when the collaboration between MIT and FastShip Atlantic was announced, Simpson has been working to identify other industries that stand to gain from rapid shipping. Clothing, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, consumer electronics, and perishable goods are high on the list, he says. "But really any cargo of high value would be suitable." The value of goods is a consideration because jet-age sea travel exacts a toll in fuel. FastShip Atlantic will charge a premium beyond the typical shipping cost of 7 to 18 cents per pound. But as Simpson reads the market, "there is room for them to charge perhaps 20 or 50 percent more and still have happy shippers." What shippers get in return, according to Simpson, is not just speed but reliability. North Atlantic freighters are so vulnerable to heavy seas that they seldom arrive on time. "Trucking companies won't even send a truck to the dock until the shipping company calls to say the freighter is sitting at the berth," says Simpson. With the FastShip, he predicts, "truckers will know to arrive at twelve o'clock for a one o'clock unloading." Meanwhile, back in the lab, Sclavounos is studying the vessel's hydrodynamic properties with a computer-simulation program called SWAN (short for "ship wave analysis"). In the past, Sclavounos has used SWAN to help design several America's Cup entries, including America3 in 1992 and Young America in '95—assignments that he says have stood him in good stead for evaluating the new freighter. "You'll notice that America's Cup yachts have shallow, wide sterns that come out of the water in a very unshiplike way," he says. "They are not unlike the FastShip in many respects." Sclavounos expects any recommendations that emerge from his analysis to be modest. "The basic design is there, but we may suggest some refinements," he says. "If we can find small variations to the hull shape to improve resistance, the developers would definitely be interested because of the high fuel costs." He estimates that even a 1 percent improvement could save $1–2 million in fuel annually. Hydrodynamic analysis is only the first stage in MIT's study of the FastShip, according to Chryssostomos Chryssostomidis, head of the Department of Ocean Engineering. Next comes an examination of the ship's structure—"the challenge is to make it lightweight yet capable of withstanding the additional loads imposed by high speeds," he says—followed by a study of the propulsion system. Inspired by work on the FastShip project, Chryssostomidis and Sclavounos are now attempting to set up a center for studying fast-ship concepts generally. Advances in this area could revitalize the stalled U.S. shipping industry, says Chryssostomidis—especially if the new vessels are built at domestic shipyards (FastShip Atlantic has yet to announce a construction site). And the complexity of high-speed shipping will provide research material well beyond the one-year period officially devoted to the MIT–FastShip Atlantic collaboration. Says Chryssostomidis: "It's a beautiful problem." db |