Executive summary
Background
The Ship Life Cycle Software Solutions (SHIPLYS) Project is a three-year project which was started in September 2016 with a budget of around 6.2 million Euros. It aims to reduce the time and costs of design and production, to develop the ability to reliably produce better ship concepts through virtual prototyping and to meet the increasing requirements for Life Cycle Cost Analysis (LCCA), environmental assessments, risk assessments and end-of-life considerations as differentiators.
Introduction
Since the environmental protection has become one of the most significant issues in this century, a large number of green shipping technologies and solutions are proposed and developed to mitigate the emission release. However, determination of the optimal technology or solution for a specific case is still extremely challenging. In this project, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), a widely used evaluation method for environmental impact, is applied to determine how different technologies and solutions could help to reduce the environmental impacts of vessels. A new LCCA approach is developed to estimate the life-cycle cost of the vessels taking into account from the cradle to the grave. By considering two different assessments (LCA and LCCA), the final results will be converted into the monetary format so that an indicator of optimal alternative will be provided.
Aims and Objectives
Development of a life cycle tool within the framework of the SHIPLYS Project, namely SHIPLYS LCT, which introduces an optimal framework to promote LCA and LCCA in the marine industry. From the perspective of LCA, the purpose is to evaluate the environmental impacts (Global warming potential (GWP), Acidification potential (AP), Eutrophication potential (EP) and Photochemical ozone creation potentials (POCPs)) from significant activities in different ship life stages, namely construction, operation, maintenance and scrapping. All these potential impacts will be converted into monetary terms to enable the end user to compare them easily. To take LCCA into account, all cash flows related to the significant activities will be tracked so that it could provide an important element for the indicator.
Methodology
As a widely used method for environmental impact evaluations, LCA will be considered for all the emissions related to significant activities in different life stages. The details of these activities are provided by partners and also gathered from the literature. With determined emission quantities, the database for characterisation will be applied to convert different emissions from different environmental potential categories into the same emission. With the support of literature, the emission tax or credit will be considered to obtain the costs regarding the emission release.
LCCA will track all the cash flow involved during the ship life. After determining all the costs related to environment potentials and cash flows, the total life-cycle cost will be derived.
Summary of the results
This deliverable reports the development of the SHIPLYS LCT which carried out from a through life perspective in Task 5.1 of SHIPLYS. The LCA is particularly important for the risk-based new ship design and retrofitting of ship machinery system, where novel concepts are being proposed in modifications to the original design/retrofitting, and for a new ship design accounting for the constraints associated with SME shipyards.
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