Development of a Ballast Free Ship Design

Shipping transfers approximately 3 to 5 billion tonnes of ballast water internationally each year. Ballast water discharges non-native species leading to severe ecological problems. The present work aims at a design solution into the ballastless ship in which ballast water exchange and treatment is avoided by providing flow-through longitudinal pipes in the double bottom instead of conventional ballast tanks. During the design of the ballastless ship, different hull forms are generated with altering the hull shape in forward and aft out of which one was finalised. In addition to change in hull form the internal tank arrangement has been changed so that the propeller immersion and the minimum draft required in the ballast condition is achieved. Structural arrangement for the midship section was proposed for the modified hull form of ballast less ship as well as data on valves had been collected for the flow through condition. Finally, resistance tests were conducted on equivalent models of scale ratio 1:71 for the conventional and the proposed ballsatless form at the loaded and ballast drafts in the Hydrodynamic Towing Tank of the Department of Ocean Engineering and Naval Architecture, IIT Kharagpur. The model experiments on ballastless ship show an increase in resistance in ballast draft when compared to a conventional tanker due to the flow through pipes in double bottom.