Subjects not often discussed at maritime conferences, such as sailing in ice and antifouling, were some of the topics covered at Hiper, the eleventh “Symposium on High-Performance Marine Vehicles”.
More traditional topics, including design methods, developments in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and novel ship concepts, were also on the agenda at Hiper, which took place 11-13 September in South Africa.
In his article in SWZ|Maritime's December issue, Herbert Koelman gives a brief overview of the topics discussed at Hiper, such as:
- The innovative ship design of the "Transformable Submersible Hydrofoil Trimaran (TSHT)", a patented design created by the Florida Institute of Technology. This vessel can perform patrol tasks under water and rise to the surface and transform into a trimaran type vessel for high speed chasing.
- The Marine Bee, which is used to map and investigate the ocean floor. These small robots resemble the behaviour of bees and autonomously swarm across the ocean floor.
- Tank inspection by drones. DNV GL uses virtual reality and drones to inspect the insides of tanks both saving cost and reducing risk.
- Through cloud computing, CFD is now available on demand, making it more easily available as well as cheaper.
Of course, the article only briefly covered everything discussed. For those wanting to know more, the full Hiper 2017 proceedings can be downloaded as a PDF.
Picture: A Marine Bee (still from the video below).
Below you can watch videos of the Transformable Submersible Hydrofoil Trimaran, the Marine Bees and several of tank inspections by drone.
