Sailing at optimum trim all the time

The trim of a vessel significantly influences its resistance and hence its fuel consumption. But unfortunately, there is no unique optimum trim for a vessel as this depends on the operating parameters of speed, displacement and water depth.

FutureShip’s ECO-Assistant offers an efficient and accurate solution to point your crew to the most efficient operating condition, so you achieve instant fuel savings without modifications to the vessel.

ECO-Assistant is an easy-to-use, stand-alone software application, which requires no interfacing with the vessel’s systems and sensors, and which can be installed on any computer. By entering the operational parameters of speed, displacement and water depth, ECO-Assistant calculates the optimum dynamic trim for the specific operating condition. The associated static trim, which may be measured in port, is also computed so that the crew can adjust the static trim while loading the vessel, to meet the calculated optimum trim for the scheduled voyage. ECO-Assistant can be equipped with an optional USB acceleration sensor to measure the dynamic trim while sailing. The crew can then use this information to optimise the vessel’s trimming while underway.

The key ingredient of ECO-Assistant is a comprehensive database of ship-specific resistance data for a variety of different operating conditions.

The ship-specific resistance data for a vessel are generated by FutureShip’s state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools and FutureShip’s innovative and fully automated simulation process. Thanks to this simulation process the resistance for a large number of operational conditions can be calculated efficiently and accurately by systematically exploring the multidimensional operational space, which is a function of the trim, speed, displacement and water depth.

The simulation results are validated against existing towing tank data of tested operating conditions. The results of this complex analysis are made available to the crew in the easy-to-use ECO-Assistant tool, where only a few operational parameters are required to obtain the optimum trim angle.