European seas have a strong economic role both in terms of transport and tourism. Providing more knowledge, regarding the mean and extreme values of the wind and sea state conditions in the areas characterized by high maritime traffic, helps to improve navigational safety. From this perspective, six zones with high maritime traffic are studied. ERA5 database, a state-of-the-art global reanalysis dataset provided by ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts), is used to assess the average values and the percentiles for the wind speed and the main wave parameters in the target areas considering the period 2001–2020. The main European routes and the extreme conditions along them as well as the areas characterized by high values of wind speed and high waves were also identified. A more comprehensive picture of the expected dynamics of the environmental matrix along the most significant shipping routes is useful because in this way the most dangerous areas could be avoided by ships for the safety of passengers and transported goods.
The Mediterranean Sea is the largest sea in the world and its most important sub-divisions regarding maritime traffic are the Ionian Sea, Tyrrhenian Sea, Ligurian Sea, Balearic Sea, Alboran Sea, Aegean Sea and the Adriatic Sea. This paper analyses how marine traffic has evolved in this area over the centuries, considering the historical traffic corridors (such as the Adriatic-Ionian Transport Corridor), the climate, the different sea-level rise due to climate change, and the wave heights and its period. Water circulation on Mediterranean is affected on a short time scale due to weather changes, and especially due to changes in salinity and temperature that could make the sea more stratified by the end of the 21st cen-tury. Regarding the complex meteorological factors, the high number of islands, islets, narrow passages, canals and submerged rocks in the waters, Mediterranean Sea remains one of the most important shipping routes with significant tanker traffic and unfortunately one of the areas with higher risk of maritime accidents, 75% of the shipping accidents being recorded in Aegean Sea.
The study of the behaviour of ships in the real sea has become a real challenge in recent years due to climate change, especially in the European sea basin. One of the main categories of types of ships that cross these waters are transport ships. The development of the economy and trade have a major influence on this type of ships, which must be studied and improved in order to be fully exploited. Investigating the ship’s behavior is not a new topic, but the changing environment of the transport ship’s specifications requires continuous study. An alternative to model testing is the use of numerical simulation through which performance can be fully evaluated using only computers, without the need to produce a scale model for testing. Due to improved computer performance, but also the disadvantages of towing testing, numerical simulations have become increasingly popular for determining ship characteristics. The shorter time in which results can be obtained, as well as the ease of controlling and changing the input parameters, contributes to the preference to use numerical simulations, to the detriment of basin tests. In this paper, the behavior of a Post-Panamax benchmark container ship in regular waves was studied. Numerical simulations were performed using SHIPFLOW MOTIONS, a solver that treats potential nonlinear flows for regular waves and provides accurate results by the free surface potential flow panel method. For our case, the simulations were performed for a range of six speeds corresponding to Froude numbers ranged between 0.174 and 0.218, for five nondimensional wavelengths (λ/Lpp) and for four wave heights. Because body discretization is one of the main factors for obtaining accurate results, an additional study was conducted in calm waters on body refinement and the influence that the mesh has on results, for a range of ten grids with different densities.
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