DEKC Maritime

At DEKC, we have formulated a philosophy towards how we, as a design company, can contribute towards zero emission shipping. This philosophy is fourfold: make our designs so they intrinsically require less energy; use clean energy when available and viable; make our designs flexible to incorporate future viable solutions; and adopt available off-the-shelf technologies to decrease emissions.

The first aspect lies the closest to our heart as ship designers: how can we create our designs so they intrinsically require less energy to operate? This hinges on continuously improving the tools we use to analyse our designs, and to continuously gain a better understanding of how our designs will eventually be used. We use state-of-the-art tools for evaluating the performance of our designs, such as CFD and parametric optimization, and consider this in a holistic way. Also, we use tracked operational data from ships to better understand how they operate and what feasible improvements would be; as such, we are also an executive partner in the join TU Delft – NHL Stenden “TODDIS” project, which aims to improve design information for ships by using operational data.

For the second aspect, we consider our position a reactive one when making designs that use clean energy. It is not up to us to push one specific form of clean energy carrier such as methanol or ammonia. Instead, we consider it our duty to keep up with the state-of-the-art of all possibilities for clean energy, including the relevant regulations, and knowing what implications these have on the design. The use of a clean energy carrier must always be viable for the operation of the vessel in question, both financially and in terms of availability. Nonetheless, whenever a design is ideally suited for a particular form of clean energy, we will include this in our proposal for the design.

To make a design now that can keep sailing through the energy transition is the key focus of the third aspect of our philosophy: by thinking carefully about where to reserve space for future installations and fuel tanks, making the power generators easy to access, and even modularizing the power production on-board, a design can be made very fuel-flexible. How the vessel is propelled plays a part too, as a drivetrain with a combustion engine will be more limited in flexibility than an electric drivetrain.

Finally, where possible available techniques to reduce emissions are implemented. As with the fuels themselves, we see our role in this aspect as a reactive one, where our expertise in the workings of the vessel helps identify which existing measures would be viable for the design. These can include wind-assisted propulsion systems, efficient power trains, exhaust gas cleaning systems, and waste heat recovery. Combining this with the other three aspects, we believe this approach allows us to make new designs significantly more efficient without sacrificing operability.