Apostolos Papanikolaou – författare

Risk-based ship design is a new scientific and engineering field of growing interest to researchers, engineers and professionals from various disciplines related to ship design, construction, operation and regulation. The main motivation to use risk-based approaches is twofold: implement a novel ship design which is considered safe but - for some formal, regulatory reason - cannot be approved today and/or rationally optimize an existing design with respect to safety, without compromising on efficiency and performance. It is a clear direction that all future technological and regulatory (International Maritime Organisation) developments regarding ship design and operation will go through risk-based procedures, which are known and well established in other industries (e.g. nuclear, aviation).

The present book derives from the knowledge gained in the course of the project SAFEDOR (Design, Operation and Regulation for Safety), an Integrated Project under the 6th framework programme of the European Commission (IP 516278). The book aims to provide an understanding of the fundamentals and details of the integration of risk-based approaches into the ship design process. The book facilitates the transfer of knowledge from recent research work to the wider maritime community and advances scientific approaches dealing with risk-based design and ship safety.

This book deals with ship design and in particular with methodologies of the preliminary design of ships. The book is complemented by a basic bibliography and five appendices with useful updated charts for the selection of the main dimensions and other basic characteristics of different types of ships (Appendix A), the determination of hull form from the data of systematic hull form series (Appendix B), the detailed description of the relational method for the preliminary estimation of ship weights (Appendix C), a brief review of the historical evolution of shipbuilding science and technology from the prehistoric era to date (Appendix D) and finally a historical review of regulatory developments of ship''s damage stability to date (Appendix E).

The book can be used as textbook for ship design courses or as additional reading for university or college students of naval architecture courses and related disciplines; it may also serve as a reference book for naval architects, practicing engineers of related disciplines and ship officers, who like to enter the ship design field systematically or to use practical methodologies for the estimation of ship''s main dimensions and of other ship main properties and elements of ship design.