This year, the Blue Forum and the Vessel Operator Forum joined forces to organise the 12^th edition of the BlueWeek in Italy.

More than 200 delegates from over 20 countries participated in the BlueWeek that was hosted by ACTV, the Venetian public transportation company, and VELA. All the seminars and project meetings took place in the Arsenale of Venice.

Delegates were delighted to have the privilege to visit the MOSE installation that protects the city and the laguna from rising water levels.

As well as the seminars on Renewable Marine Energy, Maritime Spatial Planning & Multi-use (co-organised with the European Blue Forum), Infrastructure & Operations, Natural Propulsion and Zero Emission Technologies, several project meetings took place during the week: Top Tiers, FC-series, WISP2 and the members meeting of the IWSA. We also kicked-off two new projects, the Tripping JIP, which attracted 11 participants, and the third phase of wind propulsion JIP - WISP3 - with a total of 28 participants. Those new initiatives are still open for additional participants.

The 2025 edition will be held in April and hosted by MARIN at its Wageningen HQ. For the latest updates, presentations and news, please check www.blueforum.org

To verify a ship’s performance at sea the need for a practical, accurate, and transparent method led to the development of what is now the ISO15016:2015. The standard, which was developed within MARIN’s Sea Trials Analysis (STA) joint industry project, is now used industry-wide for the verification of the performance of newbuilt, existing ships and refits.

Although the developed standard was a stark improvement over the previous methods, after many years of service we can identify areas where there is room for improvement.

MARIN is proposing a new phase with the STA-2 JIP. The project aims to refine the method and achieve the increasingly stringent demands on accuracy, while having it remain a practical and transparent method for trial commanders and EEDI verifiers to use, for example.

The project will investigate existing and proposed correction methods for the effects of wind, waves and currents. Where necessary, new methods will be developed, and existing ones updated. Validation campaigns will be performed, aimed at verifying new approaches and support adaptation.

With a proposed start at the end of 2024, all stakeholders from the maritime industry are now invited to join.

During the BlueWeek, the Tripping JIP kicked off with 11 participants.

It was decided to reduce the scope of work and start with the available budget. Instead of extensively studying the B-series, the 4-bladed C-series will take a more dominant role. They will be measured again with tripping for torque, thrust and spindle torque. Tripping will provide a fully turbulent boundary layer at model scale. Supplementary, fully turbulent RANS computations will provide the scale effects to develop a full-scale polynomial.

The Tripping JIP is joined by five European model institutes for reference testing, propulsion tests with and without tripping, and comparisons of scale-correction methods. The aim is to tackle the scale-effect on propellers together with the industry and to propose a reliable basis for future powering predictions to the ITTC.

The Tripping JIP also looks forward to investigating extensions for ducted propellers amongst other things.

New participants are welcome to join!