Research news

Prof. Dean Vucinic gives a plenary talk at ICCME’21

On 22 September 2021, Prof. Dean Vucinic gave a plenary talk at ICCME’21 where he presented the Croatian project funded by the European Commission, on development of a zero-emission passenger sailing ship.
The lecture gave an overview of the electrical ship design powered by the solar and wind energy sources presenting the European sailing passenger ship project, which is under implementation and the final outcome is expected to be a real-scale prototype of a 3-masted cruising sailing for a minimum of 36 passengers, thus the zero-emission propulsion exhaust gases will be achieved due to its wind/electrical propulsion. This main project objective is well-aligned with the European Commission and multiple governments goals, as the urgent action is required by all industries to cut carbon emissions in order to halt global warming by shrinking the CO2 footprint, and shipping is no exception. The electrical ship propulsion will be enabled by the wind/sun/hydro renewable energy sources, transforming them to electricity and storing in the rechargeable batteries, which will power the electrical propulsion engine. The recharging of the batteries will be possible by converting wind and sun energy applying different technological solutions as: reversible propeller, hydrokinetic turbine with generator/engine, wind generator, photovoltaic system and connection to coastal power sources. The presented “Electrical Ship Design Challenges” are the preparatory base for this interesting research and development aiming to come up with the functional and innovative transportation, which will have zero-emission of greenhouse gases. The ship prototype will be built in the Croatian shipyard, Brodosplit, and consequently, empower Croatian shipbuilding industry with such new product and its commercialization for the world waterborne transportation market.
Prof. Vucinic is also the member of the conference Advisory/Technical Program committee and the Editor-In-Chief of the upcoming conference proceedings, which will be published by Springer.
Click here to see a few slides from the presentation of Prof. Vucinic.
Click here to see a streamed talk on YouTube from the conference (time interval 3h23-4h35).