Shipbuilding

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Shipbuilding is called engineering, which deals with the development of ships, and the industry that manufactures and repairs ships.

Shipbuilding today

Shipbuilding takes place in specialized companies, the shipyards. There, the individual parts are cut out of steel or light metal sheet and profiles. In steel shipbuilding, Holland profiles (according to EN 10067: bead profile/bulb profiles) are common, these are rectangular profiles with a similar cross section as a railway rail and with a bead-shaped belt on one side, i.e. approximately a rounded L profile. Cutting takes place in steel shipbuilding with cutting burners. If necessary, the components are curved if they form part of the outer skin. They are then welded together to form sections. For example, a section can be the bow bead, part of the pre-steve or part of the floor. The sections are brought to the dock for final assembly (formerly also on the Helgen). There they are welded together. Since they are usually slightly warped, the special skill consists in deforming them by skillful expenditure of force in order to bring the two sheet-metal edges to be welded together into congruence. Deckhouses, chimneys and similar deck superstructures are produced in parallel in the same way, or they are occasionally also produced by suppliers. They are then placed on as a whole and welded. The welds are laid – as far as possible – by automatic machines, which reaches its limits in the strongly curved regions of the fore and aft ship.

Even in the shell state, the ship is left to water. If it was not built in the dock, but on the Helgen, this process is called stacking. Subsequently, the final expansion takes place at the equipment quay. While the heavy plate construction is produced by the yard itself, all other components are purchased by suppliers, because the lowest possible production depth is also the most economical in shipbuilding. After test runs, which serve, among other things, to prove the contractually agreed speed, the ship is handed over to the owner. It is not uncommon for final work on the equipment and equipment to be carried out during the test drive due to time constraints.

The manufacture of a ship is preceded by design and construction. The design shall be accompanied by model tests in a shipbuilding experimental facility to determine the required engine power, manoeuvrability and sea state behaviour and, if necessary, correct the design. CFD software is usually not powerful enough to replace model trials. The complex interactions between ship and water push the CFD computing models to their limits, so that a lot of basic research has to be done. Ship constructions are equipped with special shipbuilding