Rules & Regulations
Technical Bulletin 2013

Bureau Veritas strategic research developments are always directly linked to the improvements of the existing rules and regulation practices. This is valid for all the aspect of the ship safety as well as the energy efficiency which is becoming more and more important nowadays. Five papers in this section present the most recent achievements.

Structural integrity of the floating structures being one of the most important topics covered by Classification society’s rules, the biggest research effort is put on the continuous improvements of the existing rules and procedures. Thanks to significant improvements of the hydro-structure numerical tools which become more and more accurate, the so called direct calculation procedures for ship structural assessment gain more and more importance in practice. An essential role of Class Society is the harmonization of these direct calculation procedures with the existing rule approaches. Some aspects of this work are covered by first two papers of this section. In particular the non-linearity of the extreme vertical bending moment, which is the most important design quantity for ship design, was investigated and it was shown that the existing rule formulas for the sag/hog ratio need to be updated and made ship dependent. The second paper discusses the coherence in between the Goal Based Ship Construction Standards (GBS) introduced by IMO in 2010 and the new Harmonized Common Structural Rules (HCSR) of IACS. The role of Bureau Veritas in the development of HCSR was crucial especially on the harmonization of the wave loading where the BV experience is extremely well recognized by the community.

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