The integrated use of modern seakeeping and powering computational techniques and state of the art meteo-marine forecasting and hindcasting resources has the potential of disclosing new ways to approach many relevant issues in the fields of operations planning at sea, weather routing, in-service ship energy management and pollution control, and also in ship design optimization procedures of both hydrodynamic and powering characteristics.
In this paper we describe preliminary results of a study aimed to estimate the in-service optimal efficiency propulsion plant settings for a real ship in realistic seaways. In the study numerical simulations of the ship responses and powering conditions along a real route in Mediterranean sea are performed. In the simulations detailed meteo-marine hindcasting data are used, consisting of wind data and complete directional waves spectra along the route. Strip theory is applied, with these data, for the seakeeping computations needed to evaluate the contributions of wind and waves added resistances in realistic seaways. Such results are then used in powering computations, to evaluate the engine conditions, in terms of fuel consumption and COX and NOx emission, dynamically evolving in time along the route. The results of such computations are analysed to evaluate the in-service optimization potentialities for the available settings of the given ship propulsion plant. Finally heuristic hints are also preliminarily suggested for the use of scenario simulations with realistic meteo-marine data in the powering matching phases of the ship design process.