The UK’s University of Strathclyde won the top prize in the third Worldwide Ferry Safety Association’s Student Design Competition for a Safe Affordable Ferry. The $5,0000 USD award for the design was presented by Bekir Sitki Ustaoglu, Asia Pacific chief of the IMO Technical Cooperation Division, at the Ferry Safety and Technology Conference in New York. The presentation was made at the at the Ferry Safety and Technology Conference in New York on June 2.

Teams from Hochschule Bremen – City University of Applied Sciences in Germany won the two second prizes. Two third prizes were awarded to India’s Tolani Maritime Institute and the United States Naval Academy.

The requirements of this year’s competition were to design a Roll On/Roll Off — Passenger ferry (Ro/Pax) able to transport 185 passengers, plus a crew of 15 and cargo carrying vehicles, on a route linking five islands surrounding Indonesia’s Savu Sea.  A ferry design for Indonesia was chosen as it is the fourth largest country by population and population and is an archipelago of 922 permanently inhabited islands. Previous contests have designed ferries for Bangladesh and Papua New Guinea.

The Strathclyde design, Savutec , is distinctive for its focus of surviving damage. “Probabilistic damage stability has been calculated to find the weakest points of the ferry which were corrected by the implementation of the new system called Damage Stability Recovery System (DSRS). The DSRS reduces the risk of capsizing and sinking by 11 per cent, important in view of a fire onboard or grounding inducing ingress of water due to a breached hull. Similarly, they have successfully included the design of longitudinal bulkheads and have relocated openings and splash-tight doors, all of which positively increase the safety factor. Moreover, with the implementation of the DSRS, lifeboats are not needed anymore. Only liferafts are considered which make an important cost saving.”