In recent years we have been seeing an increased awareness of the need for proposing “clean” passenger vessels in order to limit the negative environmental impact due to gas emissions and simultaneously satisfying an acceptable commercial speed to ensure daily and regular services to citizens, commuters and tourists. However, this has to cope with the competitive speed and flexibility performances of other modes of transport.

This leaves ample scope for developing a variety of waterborne hybrid technology for passenger ferries. 

The scope of this research has been to concentrate the engineering and design innovations on the:

• development of an optimized hull: in order to obtain specific hydrodynamic capabilities (lower resistance, greater stability and improved propulsion characteristics).

• Improvement of the passengers’ comfort: with the reduction of noise, vibrations and exhaust gas.

  This paper will present the reasons behind the research strategy that has led to a new generation of trimaran hulls by minimising the hull’s drag-design approach. This will be based on a critical analysis of the diversity of the solutions in the hulls design and the variety of operational specifications. Then the paper will be comparing Methods and Tools for various Hulls’ choices for various configuration of Trimaran choices and objectives. Then the design and towing tank test of a scaled trimaran model will be illustrated along with some key and relevant results. Finally, the assets of the trimaran to full- scale exploitation for a Low-Emissions Small Crafts will be described.