Platform for assessing ship emissions from a life cycle perspective ι

This paper presents an original software platform that has been developed to provide assessments of air emissions produced throughout the life cycle of ocean going ships. The life cycle stages covered are shipbuilding, ship operation including major ship maintenance activities, and ship dismantling. In the platform, the ship is viewed as a series of subsystems, which are formulated by processes that themselves are essentially a series of algorithms. The MATLAB environment has been used to incorporate and handle the series of algorithms in this platform. The developed model covers the dominant ship greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants produced during a typical life cycle of a cargo ship. Emissions inventories can be produced at process level, at subsystem level, but also per life cycle stage level, per trip, per year etc. The platform has also the capability to elaborate different ship operation scenarios in order to assess the emission impact of important parameters such as the ship speed and the use of alternative fuels. Finally, the paper presents and comments on an illustrative example with results produced from a case study of a Capesize bulk carrier ship (206,000 tonnes dwt).