The underside of the ship is probably already curved and they've been making them that way for a while, so I'd imagine ship builders to have plenty of experience with this sort of thing.
Normally it is not patentable if it's obvious to a person skilled in the topic, if there is prior art, or if there is no business application. I would say this fails two out of three.
Assuming the patent is simply "curved superstructure" and not "superstructure designed to minimize a certain function of wind shear forces over a variety of angles vs a vector parallel to the direction of travel". That's not a trivial problem; its not clear anybody else has ever done it this particular way; and it has a clear business application (minimizing fuel costs for maritime transport). Sounds like a home run to me!
Boat hulls and decks have specific laws which make them patentable.
In 1988 Florida tried to make a law protecting boat hull designs and was shot down by the US Supreme Court. Legislators got involved and so part of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act includes protection of hull designs.
The rationale is: As a boat maker you have experts do a lot of very expensive work with thinking, simulation, real world modeling, building and testing full sized prototypes sweating all the little fiddly details. You finally stumble upon a good hull for some market. Then you spend dump truck loads of marketing money to convince people that it is a good hull for their boating needs. Success! So some clown then borrows one of the boats, makes a mold, and starts selling them cheaper with no R&D expenses and customers flock to him because they can tell its "just like" your boat.
Fun legal/programmer note: The law had to be fixed in 2009 because some of aforesaid clowns figured out that "hull" was defined to be the hull and the deck, so they were making molds, copying the hull and changing an irrelevant detail on the deck and counting as a different design. The 2009 law splits hull and deck, fixes a bunch of AND and OR logic, and closes that bug report on the law.
So that piques my curiosity, why don't car manufacturers go the same route?
Apparently in some parts of the world some new car MFGs copy the look and feel of more expensive cars and other than complain a bit, the other manufacturers don't seem to enter into litigation with each other over design much --given the very similar designs some models have.
Probably because car manufacturers haven't lobbied the relevant governments successfully. I suspect in many cases, the companies doing the copying are local and therefore have more influence over the relevant government than the foreign company that originated the design.
We also see a lot of cases where the copying isn't really copying. The first generation of Lexus IS300, for example was a compact rear wheel drive luxury sedan with an inline six engine and sporty handling. Most car people reading that description would immediately think "BMW 3-series", and that was, of course the best-known entry in market the IS300 was intended for. It's hardly a clone though; no component was directly copied from BMW, the styling was clearly not intended to be mistaken for a BMW product, the engine was already used in other Toyota products, etc....
The blatant car design copying is pretty much only done in China, and happens with tacit government approval. So lobbying and litigation are unlikely to be very effective there.
It doesn't cease to amaze me how stupid IP laws can get. Better said, how much power money can buy you. As the parent is saying, this is nothing new. See here [1] how F1 cars have adapted to reduce drag. I simply cannot see how this is patentable given the prior art.
The last line of the article was quite interesting: President Katsuhiko Ochi continues to inspire employees to make new designs and hull forms that cannot be copied by other companies.
Is this about the bow or the bridge? This[1] looks like a hemispherical bow to me. The article talks about wind tunnel tests, making me think they're not talking about under-water features. Are air-based tests valid for fluids with such drastically different density and viscosity (e.g. salt water)?
Edited to add: it seems that the "bow" is "the front of the ship"[2] and not specifically any part above or below the water. Looks like in this particular design, the bridge is at the bow, and the bow is round.
"The prow is the forward-most part of a ship's bow that cuts through the water. The prow is the part of the bow above the waterline. The terms prow and bow are often used interchangeably to describe the most forward part of a ship and its surrounding parts."
Cutting carbon emissions is a separate goal because the EU seems to have a directive that seeks to reduce carbon emissions among the ships that service the EU market (somehow). I don't seem to be able to search the web effectively to find discussions of this directive. It came to my attention while reading about some other maritime silliness. There seems to be mention of something here: http://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/transport/shipping/index_...
This still seems a long way off the 'marginal gains' in aero that F1, cycling or the world of aerospace are chasing. Which is not really a surprise, I guess the winds they are 'cheating' here are the sort of extreme winds you feel on a seafront at the end of a terrace of big buildings, the sort you cannot stand up in. I imagine rounding the edges off does the job even if 'laminar flow' isn't quite as it is in F1.
Per ton-mile, they're far and away the energy- and emissions-cheapest form of bulk transport we have. Someday, we'll pull container ships by high-altitude kite or something, but until then, 50+% thermal efficiencies aren't something to dismiss out of hand.
That's the good part. The bad part is that bunker oil is the opposite of a petroleum distillate. It's what's left over. So it has all the sulfur and other contaminants you want to get rid of for other refinery products. The difference is enormous: hundreds of times the sulfur vs refined fuels, etc.
Is that part and parcel of ship building? Do cars and trucks and planes also patent the look and feel of their vehicles? Sometimes the lines of a Hyundai are not all that distinct from a Mecedes, so, could another shipbuilder just slightly change the design and not infringe?
Did they actually get awarded the patent? It might still be snaking it's way through the long application process, which could mean that it might not meet the rules regarding non-obvious inventions.
> The ship's distinctive design, which was patented in Japan, the U.S., South Korea, China and seven European countries, helps improve fuel efficiency.
Green idea: One could skip the bow and replace it with CCTV HD cameras and keep the crew in ground level on the middle of the ship where it will be least rocky. Shouldnt that reduce air drag even more?
Go a step further, make the ship autonomous, run them in flotillas and have an engineer or two between the whole lot for any mechanical issues. they could have luxurious staterooms, given that you'd need only a few crew for a dozen ships.
That is a PR release but it is far from vaporware. They have been working on the systems, procedures, and logistics for years. You might want to look into their progress and the industry coverage.
If the ship is completely controlled by remote, and the goods on board are essentially immobile (are they going to be able to get cars off the ship on the high-seas), what can a pirate do? They can hop a lift to the nearest port.
Also, being 'remote' doesn't have to mean 'unprotected'.
I suspect there would be enough of value that could be stripped off the ship and removed to make it worth the pirate's time. Bear in mind that it doesn't matter to pirates if they cause millions of dollars of damage to extract a small fraction of that for themselves.
Cripple a hugely valuable ship and destroy much of its equipment and cargo to extract a few hundred thousand dollars worth of stuff that you can take with you? Sounds like a reasonable deal for a group of pirates. Hell, they might as well try and sink the ship once they are done with it to make it hard to gather evidence and determine exactly what was stolen.
It would take some time for people to do the math to determine what components of ships and common cargo have the highest value Vs their portability but someone would figure it out eventually.
Sink it with what? they attack it with fishing boats and AK47's you'll need a literal ton of explosives to sink on of those ships.
They can't offload the containers and other than the money in the captain's vault there is nothing of value other than the propane tanks in the galley (that and the med bay is the only thing they raid).
I said "try to sink it" not that they would necessarily succeed. That said if they are on board and have unlimited access to the entire ship it may be possible to sink it without any explosives. Not all ships even require explosives to be scuttled.
>They can't offload the containers
I never suggested that they would. Rather I suggested that they would ransack the ship and cargo looking for valuable components or equipment that is transportable.
basically whole towns/villages live symbiotically with pirates which makes it difficult to do anything about it. They just commandeer the ship, steer it to their home port, and await the payout.
No one claims that piracy has died, we are all aware of the pirates in Africa, the Indian Ocean and in the Pacific.
But there is no homeport that can harbor not to mention offload any of those ships, they ransom the crew every time (often not even the entire crew). Those ships hull on average about 4000 containers you need a modern port to offload them, a fishing village in Somalia won't cut it, the ship won't even be able to dock.
The only ports in Somalia which are capable of harboring a cargo vessel are in Mogadishu, Berbera, Bosaso and Kismayo the Pirates simply cannot operate from those areas as the Somali government controls those ports pretty tightly.
Majority are down to a dozen crew members. Organised into 2-3 watches over a 24 hour period. And the kitchen (galley) crew who feed the crew.
And at sea things are literally breaking all the time. Ships require ongoing maintenance, as in someone walking around tightening, checking for rust, repairing.
Finally, SOLAS rules requires someone to be on watch and manning the radio. Though this I'm pretty sure is ignored by some. I've hailed a few cargo ships and never got a response.
Presumably as this is a container ship the height of the ship when it's fully loaded will be much higher than in the picture. The bow essentially acts as an aerodynamic nose cone to the container stack.
Reliability and fail-safe are important considerations at sea. Glass windows still work when electrical power is lost. Warships take the concept further, placing the navigation bridge where it's most effective but having a completely redundant alternate control centre deep inside the ship where it's best protected.
CCTV is a 2D image of a 3D environment. You'd miss out on the depth perception, not to mention reflective and transparent effects of the water's surface. And probably other things I am missing. This is a ship many hundreds of feet long carrying up to billions of dollars in goods. As a pilot I would not want to not have a real view of where I was going.
AUGMENT my real view with radar screens, depthfinder etc and now we are talking.
Another alternative could be a movable bridge that somehow retracts when the ship is cruising but moves back into position when coming into port.
Definitely an interesting design. In my eyes it looks like it should be unstable - I guess we're naturally inclined to think of curved parts of ships as being the underwater parts.
That might be, but it might also be just how car carriers look like. If you do an image search for "roro ship" (roro=roll on/roll off, the official name for them) then you can see that all have huge freeboard. To me they all look unsteady. A particularly nice example is the MV Cougar Ace lying on its side. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Cougar_Ace#/media/File:Coug... )
Isn't the bridge usually at the stern on container ships? I thought that's because the engines are in the back, and you don't want to make the controls travel a lot. Wonder how this is solved here?
It was my understanding that towers were in the back so pilots could look not only at their destination, but also down on the ship to see its orientation
Usually it makes sense to put the deck house right on top of the engine room. Less wasted cargo space, think funnels, cargo hatches etc. Also, the engine room people appreciate being able to get to their sleeping quarters and the canteen with dry shoes.
Further, putting the engine room as far towards the aft as possible also makes sense, shorter and cheaper propshaft and less cargo space wasted for it either.
Kind of a non sequitur, but I once found a flyer on the sidewalk in Boulder CO that advocated for inclining airplane runways by, I forget, 5% or so.
The idea was that departing flights would take off in the downward-sloping direction, gaining boost to momentum from gravity, while incoming flights would land uphill making it easier to brake.
I have no idea if this would actually work, but the idea has stuck with me.
Runways are aligned with the prevailing winds in the area, such that aircraft can land along either direction depending on the wind. The uphill/downhill slope thing would require twice as many runways per airport lest pilots be stuck trying to take off uphill into the wind.
It might be a disadvantage to take off uphill, but I believe that it's desirable to take off into a head wind.
The wind generates some of the lift required for take off, and by taking off sooner there is more runway available in case you need to make an emergency landing.
> It might be a disadvantage to take off uphill, but I believe that it's desirable to take off into a head wind.
Both takeoff and landing are safer and more efficient in headwind, since lift is a function of airspeed an increase in airspeed (from headwinds) a larger margin or security or lower groundspeed in both situations.
GP's point is if your runways are slanted (rather than flat), instead of having both takeoff and landing use the same runway in the same direction (headwinds) you now need a runway slanting into the headwind (for takeoffs) and one slanting away from it (for landings).
I don't know about other coastal areas, but the winds in SoCal will frequently blow either from the water or to the water due to other meteorological factors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Ana_winds
At hundreds of miles an hour, isn't wind resistance orders of magnitude stronger than rolling friction? If you live somewhere with even moderate wind, and that wind doesn't always blow in the same direction, you'd want to take off with the wind and land against it, which would cause problems when that meant landing on the downslope or taking off on the upslope. I suppose you could mitigate that by having runways that slope up and to the east, down and to the east, etc.
It makes for some really dramatic landings. Upon touchdown you have to apply full power, or you might not make it to the top of the runway. Also, there is no go-around. You either land successfully, or you crash. There is no third option.
Just to add to the fun it's at 2,845m too. Take off seems to be not some much about lift, but rather not falling too much when you drop off the end of the runway. It's an experience.
This is cool and everything but it distracts from the fact the water drag is 2 (maybe 3?) of orders of magnitude larger than air drag. It might have been a better investment to install vortex generators on the hull (these work like the dimples in golfballs to reduce the vacuum formed behind the moving body). I may be wrong about this, for example if laminar flow is better in an incompressible fluid.
I find this comment very puzzling. A team of experts spent months or years designing and building a ship. Are you really suggesting they just forgot about the hydrodynamic drag? If the first thing that pops into your head was actually a "better investment", don't you think they might have managed to think of it too?
I'm sure they optimized hydrodynamic drag too. My point was that aerodynamic drag is so much lower that the bow of the ship could have been shaped like a pokemon and it would have made almost no difference on overall efficiency. An analogy would be putting a nose cone on a train. It looks cool and everything but the train is still going to lose half its thermodynamic efficiency (or more) just burning oil. Whereas jumping to electric reclaims all that, and I was trying to make a similar point that higher gains might be found elsewhere for shipping.
I've often wondered why so much of our transportation infrastructure appears to utterly discount things like aerodynamics. Planes and (some) passenger cars pay attention, but trucks, tractor-trailers, trains, and buses are basically moving bricks, slamming into the air in front of them, and dragging a partial vacuum behind them. Awfully fuel-inefficient, that.
> trucks, tractor-trailers, trains, and buses are basically moving bricks, slamming into the air in front of them, and dragging a partial vacuum behind them.
There are lots of aero studies for these (aerodynamic efficiency is why tractor trailer often convoy on highways, it's also why some trailers are skirted), but aerodynamic efficiency is not the only concern, and the speed at which they go means the actual effect is relatively low (just look at trains, serious locomotive profiling starts at system going twice the standard speed of a semi or more, trains going at roughly semi- or car-speed like freight trains tend to be even boxier than semi tractors)
The side skirts you see hanging from 53' trailers on the freeway are a cheap example.
Some of these hardware improvements will pay for themselves quite quickly if the gain is 0.5 mpg over many hundreds of thousands of km, at normal diesel prices in the US and Canada.
Trucking is such a thin margin business that anything which gives a competitive edge in operational costs and $ per km will be adopted quickly.
Ships, out of all modes of transportation, could use the wind to really reduce the fuel consumption. Giant kites that are fully automatic should be able to drag even the largest ships.
I actually posted another comment, previously in this story's discussion, mentioning high-altitude kite propelled container ships. You'd probably still need to burn something (or somehow otherwise) turn screws for maneuvering and propulsion in coastal waters, but that's a small fraction of the fuel burned each crossing.
No even with kite propulsion cargo ships will still need to run the main engine constantly. Wind just isn't strong enough to push a huge ship through the water a reasonable speed using a relatively small kite. See the other link in the sibling post; total fuel consumption with a kite is only 5% lower.
There are practical limits to kite size in order to keep them controllable. And where would you put multiple kites? Deck space is at a premium and they won't sacrifice cargo capacity.
I think the spherical shape is cool, but I'm surprised they actually put it on the bow. I wonder about vertical motion of the bow which always seems more pronounced than midships or aft during a heavy storm.
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