International Conferences

The present compendium of files contains all technical documents presented and discussed during the Seventeenth Ship & Offshore Structures Congress held in South Korea some years ago in 2009. It consists of the proceedings of eight specialist committees dealing with the damage assessment after accidental events, fabrication technology, utilization of the ocean wind-and-wave energy, floating production systems, naval ship design, sailing yacht design, condition assessment of aged ships, impulsive pressure loading and response assessment.

The second part of the volume contains eight documents corresponding to the technical committees covering the environment, the loads,  quasi-static and dynamic response, ultimate strength, fatigue, fracture, design principles and applicable criteria, design methods. As everyone may see from the above list of the topics that have been addressed during the event, the information included in this set of technical papers is very valuable and practical so we believe that it would be very beneficial to all marine industry professionals to go through all of them to get updated with the recent scientific developments and researches, especially taking into consideration that all articles have been prepared by the world recognized industry experts.

The international maritime industry of today is being challenged by so many important factors, one of them being the fall—out from the current economic crisis causing the rippling effects; we shall also take into close consideration the global warming effect with all scientific impacts involved, as well as the direction in which today's shipping industry shall move to decrease negative impact of the air emissions another factor to be considered is rising cost of energy and shortage of the manpower experienced elsewhere — of course, these factors will not disappear in the nearest future and shall therefore be paid attention.

This problem cannot be fixed immediately, and the participants of the shipping industry have to get the vessels manned with better rained and adjusted personnel having all required internship at sea. It shall be noted that safety and security, as well as the environmental credentials of shipping and whole future sustainability of the maritime industry totally depend on developing of the capable and effective manpower resources. It is quite obvious that development and training of the manpower and all other issues connected with human resources will become one of the most serious challenges faced by the industry...

Proceedings of the RINA conference on design & operation of the bulk carriers that was held in 2009. The publication starts with the hull integrity management and covers the best established practices for maintenance of subject type of vessels, including vetting trends.

We understand that the bulk carriers live very stressful lives since they are not as robust and strong as most of the people might think, and at the same tome safe and efficient bulk carrier may only be obtained if all the ship designers and constructors, maintenance and management teams performed their duties in a proper manner.

The documents included in this compilation deal with such interesting topics as regulatory and operational challenges applicable to the bulk carriers, design and operation of bulk carriers, monitoring and maintaining ballast tank condition in vessels that are laid-up, special fatigue analysis, best practices for technical maintenance, double bottom height effect, reliability of the hull girder including challenges and possible solutions, economic and environment-friendly solutions for electric drives for the side-rolling hatch covers, predictor-corrector system for health monitoring of the structure of the hull, applicable IMO performance standards, spectral fatigue analysis etc.