Page 384 - Practical Design Ships and Floating Structures

Practical Design of Ships and Other Floating Structures 359
You-Sheng Wu, Wei-Cheng Cui and Guo-Jun Zhou (Eds)
Q 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

INNOVATION IN SHIP PRODUCTION
WHAT CAN WE EXPECT ?

Hellmut Wilckens

Forschungszentnun des Deutschen SchifTbaus,
Bramfelderstrasse 164
22305 Hamburg, Germany

ABSTRACT

The paper deals by way of example with some aspects of innovative ship production. It is a European's
viewpoint and it is meant to provoke an integrated vision of the total process from early design to
delivery of the finished product. It points out the increasing value and importance of innovative IT
tools along the process chain and leads to radically new concepts for the production of the hull
structure. The paper indicates a potential for substantial productivity gains resulting from further
increased efforts in research and development.

KEYWORDS

Ship production, Design, Production simulation, Accurate manufacturing, Laser welding product data
technology

1 INTRODUCTION
Ship production has an extremely long tradition and yet only in the last decades it moved from a
handicraft tYpe heavy industry to industrial processing in the current sense.
Ship production has many appearances depending mainly on the product and the number of products
per time unit. The making of a large warfare submarine, a luxury mega yacht or a 250.000 tdw crude
oil tanker have nearly no similarities with respect to the approach, the technologies and the methods.
This paper aims at discussing -by way of example- some future aspects of the production processes of
commercial vessels for cargo transportation and passengers. It deals mainly with the production of the
hull structu~.
This segment of the market is closely connected to the world trade develo ment and especially the
4
seaborne traffic, which in the last decade increased from roughly 17.1 x 10' ton miles to 21.5 x lo'*
ton miles Le. by 25%, (Feamleys) leading to an increase in the world fleet development from 667
million tdw to 778 million tdw i.e. 16% (Lloyds Register). This increase in trade and fleet size is
paralleled by an unprecedented development in new types of ships, new operating methods and last but
not least rapid development of production technologies and methods.