Heavy weather penalizes a ship twice — once through wind and wave drag, and again through the rudder corrections needed to hold course. Steering drag grows with the square of rudder angle, and an over-tuned autopilot can quietly add 3–10% to fuel consumption.
In long waves a pitching ship becomes a wave-maker of its own — radiating energy stolen straight from the propeller's thrust. In a Beaufort 6 sea, wave radiation alone can exceed 20% of total resistance.
Before a ship ever pitches or heaves, it loses energy to wave diffraction — short waves shattering against the bow act as an invisible hydrodynamic brake, even when the vessel feels perfectly stable.
Wind drag scales with the square of apparent wind speed — so headwinds punish fuel consumption far more than tailwinds help. Phase 2 of the vessel resistance series looks at the physics, and why wind correction decides whether your data blames the weather or the hull.
Wrapping up the calm-water resistance series and opening Phase 2 — added weather resistance, where the real fuel bill is decided.
Two underestimated sources of drag: underwater appendages (bilge keels, rudders, shafts) and the cost of steering.
Even on a dead-calm sea, moving forward creates an apparent headwind. Why air resistance matters even without weather.
The localised drag at the stern: how pressure recovery along the hull (or the lack of it) creates viscous pressure resistance.
How a ship's hull generates a system of gravity waves as it advances — and why wave-making resistance is a key driver of efficiency.
Buying a performance monitoring platform does not buy you a performance culture. This talk argues that the value of fleet data is unlocked by the people and habits around it — and looks at what actually changes behaviour on board and ashore.
A technical look at frictional resistance — the ITTC-57 correlation line, Reynolds number, boundary layers, and why it dominates calm-water drag.
Frictional resistance is one of the most underestimated drivers of inefficiency — and why fouling is a performance issue, not just a maintenance one.
Even in calm water, hidden forces fight a ship's progress. A breakdown of the five fundamental components of total resistance.
Is your vessel performance data an asset or a liability? Why data quality is the foundation of compliance in modern shipping.
Poor hull and propeller performance is an underestimated cost drain — ISO 19030 gives operators a disciplined, data-driven way to measure and manage it.
High-quality data is the only foundation for reliable insight — and that takes engineered data pipelines, not just collection.
Hull fouling quietly raises fuel consumption, cuts speed, and undermines compliance — a challenge for technical managers, owners, and charterers alike.
Continuous vessel monitoring is shifting from a nice-to-have to a commercial necessity for performance and decarbonisation.
A ship motion prediction model that combines physics-based equations with data-driven parameter optimization — keeping the interpretability of hydrodynamic models while capturing ship-specific behaviour. Validated on two container ships, with predictions over 50% more accurate than traditionally tuned physics-based baselines.
Two data-driven routes to vessel trajectory prediction go head-to-head: optimising the parameters of a physics-based hydrodynamic model versus a pure feed-forward neural network. Trained and 5-fold cross-validated on 90 simulated trajectories, the physics-based-with-optimisation approach wins — roughly 40% lower summarised error and 35% tighter consistency than the black-box model.
Physics-based ship motion models are rarely validated against real-world voyages. This study tailors a physics-based 3D dynamics model to a container ship and evaluates its sub-second predictions against real vessel trajectories — visually and with multiple distance measures.
A COP29 talk on how AI and autonomous navigation are moving shipping from the 'dark ages' of vessel performance toward a measurable, incremental path to lower fuel consumption and emissions — and what it will take to reach fully autonomous, efficient sailing.
Where artificial intelligence is genuinely changing maritime operations today, and where it is heading next — told as a journey from the 'dark ages' of vessel performance to a practical, incremental path toward autonomous, efficient sailing.
A question-and-answer session from the 2nd Ship Navigation and Voyage Optimization conference, covering audience questions on navigation, voyage optimization, and the data behind both.
Fuel consumption models often demand data operators simply don't have. This peer-reviewed study builds main-engine FOC forecasting models for a VLCC using only sensors and simple weather data that are routinely available — with XGBoost predicting within 5% of the true value in more than 86% of cases.
Fleet data has enormous untapped potential for energy efficiency — but only if it changes day-to-day decisions. This talk covers how to move from collecting data to building an energy-efficiency culture around it.
CII turns voyage decisions into a rating with commercial consequences. This conference session looks at how voyage efficiency — speed, routing, and operational choices — feeds the Carbon Intensity Indicator, and what operators can actually influence.
Energy efficiency in shipping is ultimately a set of habits — and data is what makes good habits visible, measurable, and repeatable. A virtual conference talk on connecting fleet data to the daily behaviour that determines fuel consumption.
A Riviera Maritime webinar on how operational data turns vessel maintenance from a fixed-schedule routine into a condition-based, evidence-led practice — catching problems earlier and avoiding unnecessary work.
An article on why energy efficiency in shipping is as much about culture and habits as it is about technology — and how fleet data helps build that culture.
A ShipIT 2021 talk on improving fleet performance and efficiency, and how the ISO 19030 standard provides a disciplined way to measure changes in hull and propeller performance.
A parametric design tool for fast, robust optimization of SWATH (Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull) ships, developed at NTUA's Ship Design Laboratory and validated against the Aegean Queen ferry design — optimizing the hull form for two different seasonal operating speeds.