Roll Stabilisers

Initiative

The roll performance of pleasure vessels is one of their most crucial features since it directly affects the comfort and well-being of passengers on-board. The main objective of the Roll Stabilisers JIP is to set standards and criteria to facilitate the process of selecting suitable roll stabilisers for a given vessel design and to verify their perfomances.

Return to all JIPs

BACKGROUND

The roll performance of pleasure vessels (especially yachts, cruisers and ferries) is one of their most crucial features since it directly affects the comfort and the well-being of passengers on-board. Although important, the selection of an adequate roll stabilisation system is challenging as this choice needs to be made at the early stages of the vessel design.

The main sources of uncertainties in this selection process and in the verification of product performances are:

Each supplier uses different ways to make their performance predictions in the first stages of the vessel design, before product selection and contract award. These predictions are based on experience and proprietary procedures. This leads to difficulties in comparing the performances of competing systems.
Both the design of the vessel progresses and the vessel characteristics, on which the preliminary selection of a proper stabilisation system was done, might be affected by relatively large deviations from the original hypothesis. This has an influence on the foreseen performances of the stabilisation system.
There is a lack of standard criteria for the objective evaluation of stabilisers performance. This is seen not only in the preliminary prediction phase, as mentioned in the previous point, but also during model tests and the full-scale sea trials.

Contact

Julio Polo

Project Manager

Christian Lena

Senior Project Manager

Objectives

Main objective of this JIP is to set standards and criteria to be agreed between roll stabilisation suppliers and yards:

To facilitate the process of selection of suitable products for a given vessel design already at an early design phase;
To make the comparison between competing suppliers honest, objective and scientifically robust;
To discipline the way the performance of the stabilisers are evaluated during model tests and later verified during sea trials.

Preliminary scope of work

At the moment two different work packages are foreseen. Full details can be found in the leaflet Roll Stabilisers JIP.

Definition of procedure for roll stabilisers selection, improvements of model test setup and definition of standard tests at zero and at forward speed
Definition of standard sea trial programme

It is to be noted that at the moment these two work packages are presented as steps considered essential to reach the objectives mentioned, however they are on purpose left general and open for discussion and further elaboration. Each work package will be characterised, in their initial stage, by open discussions and brainstorming between the participants. Essential will be to have a clear confrontation between roll stabilisation suppliers and yards. Only when the needs and motivations of all the parties will be clear and agreed upon it will be possible to reach standards that are meant to unify the industry and define new work procedures.

The project is envisaged to run for at least two years. A possible time frame will be presented after the work package programmes will be defined.

download

Leaflet Roll Stabilisers JIP