Analysis of Building Requirements for Oil Tankers in Order to Prevent Maritime Accidents

Abstract

One of the major components of tankers’ architecture is represented by the hull’s design. A tanker having a simple exterior structure between cargo and the ocean is not safe enough when it comes to protecting the cargo which is valuable or the environment from pollution in case of collision or grounding. Most of the new tankers have a double hull with a supplementary space inserted between the cargo tanks and the ship’s hull. There have been also some hybrid designs such as those with double laterals and a double bottom combining characteristics of the single hull ships with characteristics or those which have a double hull. In this paper we intend to present the advantages of the double hull projects such as easier ballasting operations in case of emergency, a reduction in the use of salt water for ballasting cargo tanks which led to a decrease of the corrosion phenomenon, a higher protection of the environment, faster cargo discharge operations, more efficient cargo tanks’ washing operations and especially an increased protection in case of collisions and groundings having a lower impact over the safety of the ship, cargo and marine environment. The main disadvantages of such a project are the high costs involved in building such a tanker, higher operation expenses (higher canal and port taxes), more difficult operations in ventilating the ballast tanks, the necessity for constantly monitoring and maintaining the ballast tanks, an increased surface, which led to more surfaces to maintain, a higher risk of explosion in the doubled tanks if the vapours’ detection system would not be efficient and ballast tanks’ washing becoming more difficult for double hulled ships. Over all, we are going to show how double hulled tankers are considered to be more secure in case of grounding especially if the soil is not too rocky. Still, the safety benefits are less clear for larger ships in case of a high speed impact. This is why our paper intends to show that in spite of such restrictions, the safety benefits do exist for double hulls even if less clear in case of an impact at high speed.