Abstract: The technological advancement in the equipment used in ships and emission restrictions from the classification societies forces the ship owners to periodically perform retrofitting on their ships. Therefore, ship owners today plan to utilise the docking downtime of a ship at a shipyard to its maximum potential. During this docking period in the shipyard, they would plan to perform all the retrofitting activities as well as any maintenance activities required for the ship equipment. In order to execute all the activities within the minimum downtime, a thorough and careful planning of the activities is required. With the ship under continuous operation before its docking at the shipyard, it could be possible that all the required documents for planning activities are not available for the shipyards. In order to tackle this problem, in the European Commission (EC) funded project GRIP – Green Retrofitting through Improved Propulsion, the use of Simulation Tools and Reverse Engineering was executed and tested, and so to perform the retrofitting activities more effectively and efficiently. Of the different Green technologies accessed by the GRIP Consortium, the retrofitting of Pre-Swirl Stator Fins was selected as the prototype study for testing and validating the Simulation Tools and Reverse Engineering Technologies proposed in GRIP. Tools developed in the Simulation Toolkit for Shipbuilders (STS) and newly developed planning tool anteSIM were used by CMT to perform simulation of retrofitting activities and thereby provide planning recommendations to the shipyard. IMAWIS used Laser Scanning as the Reverse Engineering technologies studied in the project to perform measurements and dimensional accuracy comparison after the assembly process of the Pre-Swirl Stator Fins. The methodologies and results from the execution of the Simulation Tools and Reverse Engineering Technology are satisfactory in order to provide beneficial recommendations for efficient planning of retrofitting activities in the shipyards.
Keywords: Retrofit, laser scanning, production simulation
