Naval Architecture

As implied in the title of this booklet, it is dedicated to the stability of the fishing vessels. The stability of subject vessels is something people commonly depend on for both their lives and livelihood. Their actions and decisions they make is what keeps their ships safe. It shall be noted as necessary that even it is a very safe vessel complying with all requirements of the applicable rules, the wrong and poor decisions related to the operation can easily result in the loss of stability and even capsizing of the vessel.

The present guide is intended to help the crew members of the fishing vessels and all people sailing on them or involved in their design and construction properly understand the most important elements directly influencing the stability of the fishing vessels as well as the critically important hazards that subject vessels are commonly exposed to. Understanding all factors reducing stability of the vessels will help people in making right decisions and taking right actions to keep their vessels safe.

The main content of the booklet has been arranged in two big sections. While the first section of the title describes the whole importance of stability covering its basics, acting forces and characteristics, the second section has been fully dedicated to the stability hazards that the readers shall look out for, such as the downflooding, overloading, water ingress, and preventive measures...

One of the main objectives of the present document is to develop a fast and stable plus reasonably accurate method of numerical simulation in order to revisit and predict the flooding scenarios. The author, Henrin Dankowski, has performed a good professional comparison with the results obtained in the course of the standard benchmark tests and repeated investigation of three accidents, namely the Estonia, the Heraklion and the European Gateway, for validation purpose.

The aim of the method presented in this volume was to fill the gap that exists there between relatively simple evaluations of ship stability and more complex and time consuming methods of simulation of the seakeeping. Subject method has been implemented in the software environment E4 specifically developed for ship design. Subject environment is providing users with the direct access to the complete vessel data model and to the computational algorithms that have already been implemented.

Calculations of the damage stability of a vessel at early stages of the design are considered essential indication of the vessel's safety level to withstanding the water ingress. Several accidents that have occurred in the past are demonstrating how important it is to consider the intermediate stages of flooding process and not only looking at the resulting final stage.