During two decades that have passed since the original publication of this book, there have been several significant technical advances in the field of design and construction of vessels and other marine floating structures. For example, nowadays, computers are among the critically important instruments in any engineering environment, including marine engineering and ship hull construction and computers have already replaced the ubiquitous slide rules of the shipbuilding engineers of earlier generations.

Note that the advances concepts and computational methods are still under development and some of them are introduced as a part of common naval engineering practice of today. These advanced practices include the FEM, standing for the finite element analysis, CFD, i.e. computational fluid dynamics, numerical modeling of the ship hull form and associated coefficients, random methods of processing, and some of them have already been incorporated into the newly established design and manufacturing systems.

The book covers all important aspects of the intact ship stability starting from its elementary principles, determination of the weights of the vessels and their centers of gravity, stability curves and metacentric height, effects that the free liquid surfaces and changes in weights have on stability, inclining test, stability of the grounded vessel, submerged equilibrium etc.

This publication includes all articles presented in the course of the RINA Conference 2009 — Innovation in high Speed Marine Vessels. Best industry experts from all over the world did participate in the subject conference, reporting on the latest developments on such the important matters as fire safety for FRP composite ships, station keeping of high speed ferries, sharing experiences from construction, design and operation of CFRP sandwich vessels and boats, explaining the protection of intellectual property for the HSC industry, and many more — there are in total almost twenty documents inside.

Designers and operators of the ships have to possess the information about the limit—state responses of a ship operating in high sea conditions, and this shall preferably be done without having to resort to costly experiments. For the sake of accuracy, the structural response of the ship shall be considered. It will be demonstrated that the coupled smoother particle hydrodynamics approach can predict the FSI (i.e. fluid—structure interaction) effects during the impact of flexible cylinder on calm water — such case would be relevant to slamming of the high speed vessels' hull.

The present title is intended to provide the required introductory technical background to the naval architecture statistics. Each of the subjects discussed within this volume has been treated in detail, and this approach has been applied starting from the very first principle. The main objective of J. Jensen, the author of this volume, was to derive and present readers all required theoretical information for the prediction of the extreme loads and evaluation of the corresponding stresses in the hull girder of the ship.

Though some part of the book is dedicated to the reliability analysis, this treatment shall be supplemented with the methods for the detailed evaluation of stress and also for the assessment of the structural strength of the ship's hull prior to the commencement of the reliability analysis. The class societies have issued their regulations covering the structural analysis of a vessel and proper selection of its scantlings. In the past, subject regulations gave formulas for the calculation of the hull thickness and size of the stiffening members.

Such empirical regulations must be conservative so that they can be applied to the majority of the vessels. However the regulation have been changed with the advent of the powerful computers. Nowadays, naval architects can perform the structural analysis of the hull using the rational methods that are based on the first principles...

All the entries in the book are arranged into sets of terms that are closely related in meaning or subject area. This allows an entry to be compared or contrasted with related entries to make the meaning of a term clearer. There are two main sections in the book.

The first comprises over 1300 basic terms commonly used in all branches of science, and which have different, and usually more precise, meanings in scientific contexts than they have in general speech. Included in this section are 180 prefixes, suffixes and general affixes of use in understanding many scientific terms. The second section defines over 8500 technical terms from the fields of biology, chemistry and physics.

The entries contain other information, besides the definition, which will be of assistance in the usage of the term. The terms for biology, chemistry and physics are not divided into three separate sections; instead the sets of terms are presented according to an overall framework of scientific principles, as can be seen in the list of Contents. The Contents shows the arrangement of terms in different subject areas. Each area is indicated by a two letter code, and within such an area or set, the terms are numbered consecutively.

The set codes are placed at the top of each page showing the numbers of the terms covered. An alphabetical index at the back of the book lists all the terms and their place in the book, and indicates the subject field of the term where relevant.

The present compendium of files contains all technical documents presented and discussed during the Seventeenth Ship & Offshore Structures Congress held in South Korea some years ago in 2009. It consists of the proceedings of eight specialist committees dealing with the damage assessment after accidental events, fabrication technology, utilization of the ocean wind-and-wave energy, floating production systems, naval ship design, sailing yacht design, condition assessment of aged ships, impulsive pressure loading and response assessment.

The second part of the volume contains eight documents corresponding to the technical committees covering the environment, the loads,  quasi-static and dynamic response, ultimate strength, fatigue, fracture, design principles and applicable criteria, design methods. As everyone may see from the above list of the topics that have been addressed during the event, the information included in this set of technical papers is very valuable and practical so we believe that it would be very beneficial to all marine industry professionals to go through all of them to get updated with the recent scientific developments and researches, especially taking into consideration that all articles have been prepared by the world recognized industry experts.

The present guidebook was prepared to provide the best and effective safety practices on proper operation of the tank barges as well as terminals; the intention of the authors was also to embrace the control philosophy based on a risk awareness. We know how critical safety is to the tanker shipping industry of today.

The authors also hope that this book will serve as a standard reference source that would be used when working on the safe operation of both inland barges and terminals. The publication is therefore kept updated with the latest technological developments and relevant legislation. We would like to emphasize that all recommendations provided in the pages of the present volume are to be thoroughly read and clearly understood.

The ultimate purpose of the volume is to improve safety of marine transportation of dangerous cargoes at the interface of the barges with terminals or other ships. It shall be noted that this publications is not intended to replace or amend the existing legal instruments, it is rather to provide the shipping industry with some valuable additional guidance not considered a part of any legal requirements. The book will also provide the personnel involved in the above mentioned operations with the operational advice and description of how exactly tanker and terminal operations are usually carried out.

The international maritime industry of today is being challenged by so many important factors, one of them being the fall—out from the current economic crisis causing the rippling effects; we shall also take into close consideration the global warming effect with all scientific impacts involved, as well as the direction in which today's shipping industry shall move to decrease negative impact of the air emissions another factor to be considered is rising cost of energy and shortage of the manpower experienced elsewhere — of course, these factors will not disappear in the nearest future and shall therefore be paid attention.

This problem cannot be fixed immediately, and the participants of the shipping industry have to get the vessels manned with better rained and adjusted personnel having all required internship at sea. It shall be noted that safety and security, as well as the environmental credentials of shipping and whole future sustainability of the maritime industry totally depend on developing of the capable and effective manpower resources. It is quite obvious that development and training of the manpower and all other issues connected with human resources will become one of the most serious challenges faced by the industry...

Today, pumps are quite commonly encountered in the industry and are actually considered essential equipment required to proper and smooth running of so many various technical systems. It is quite usual for all mechanical engineers making their first steps in this industry to possess little to no practical experience with the pumping arrangements and problems that are commonly associated with their operation and maintenance.

It is critically important for them to build up a proper understanding of the design of the pumps and pumping systems as well as of their operation. The publication tackles all above mentioned aspects in a very readable way, drawing on the long professional experience of the author. Though formally the book is dedicated to the centrifugal pumps, actually its content is covering all other types of pumps.

That is why it could be recommended to all people involved in operation and maintenance of different pump arrangements as it will definitely serve as an excellent resource for troubleshooting. The present volume has been written by hands-on people and the material contained in it has been presented in quite plain language, making it easy to understand even to non-professionals. A truly must-have one for both operating and maintenance staff.