Send any vessel design on any voyage

A shipowner is considering fitting rotor sails on a short sea vessel operating North Sea routes. The question is not whether wind assisted ship propulsion works in general. It is whether it works on this vessel, on these routes, in the actual weather conditions it encounters. AlbatrosDigital builds a physics-based digital ship model of the vessel, simulates the full operational profile with and without the wind propulsion system, and quantifies the actual fuel savings delivered. Not a theoretical average. A route-specific, vessel-specific answer grounded in real metocean data and hindcast weather.

Rotor sail performance verification and wind propulsion system analysis of this kind requires modelling the full interaction between hull, machinery and wind assist system across realistic voyage profiles. That is exactly what we do.

This is also the methodology behind ESA Project WING IT, our feasibility study into independent verification of wind propulsion savings using digital ship modelling and Earth Observation data.

An engine builder or naval architect needs to know how a propulsion system performs under the real load cases a vessel encounters in service, not under idealised test conditions. AlbatrosDigital simulates full propulsion system performance across realistic voyage profiles, identifying the optimal engine settings, propeller configuration and operational parameters for the specific vessel in its actual operating environment.

Propulsion system optimisation and engine performance simulation done this way, grounded in real operational profiles rather than assumptions, gives naval architects and OEMs results they can rely on and shipowners results they can act on. We have an active pilot with a leading propulsion simulation software provider doing exactly this.