ABSTRACT: The reduction of fuel cost has always been one of the key strategic business goals for ship owners and operators. In the current climate of high oil prices, the reduction of fuel costs becomes essential; and furthermore a variety of recent legislations require owners and operators to move towards the reduction of emissions from ships of SOx, NOx and CO. Hence the pressure on designers to achieve both reduced fuel costs and reduced emissions by optimising the hull and propeller has never been higher. In parallel to the performance improvement of new built vessels, there has been great interest in the potential to enhance the performance of existing vessels through retrofit of devices to the hull. In any case for instance the WED device must be customized to fit to the afterbody of the ship in terms of performing its supposed function. The Designer is therefore placed in the front of multiple geometric solutions from between he has to make a choice. This paper is intended to help the Designers to have a rational choosing approach by involving the numeric optimization of the geometry of the WED in order to select the best fitted WED to perform the best in order to achieve some predefined parameters. In this paperwork a given geometry of a WED device is taken and via Design Optimization the geometry of the duct was refined so that better results are achieved with a smaller and more compact WED. In doing so, the Designer is assisted by numeric optimization methods to choose from only three final candidates instead of several thousands in order to provide the best fitted WED geometry for a given ship afterbody.

KEYWORDS: Wake Equalizing Duct (WED), WED Device, WED Geometry Optimization, Reduction of Emissions, Design Optimization, Numeric Optimization Methods, WED Geometry, Energy Saving Device

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