New EU research project to focus on Arctic shipping safety

SEDNA, as it is known, comprises 13 partners from six countries and is headed by the UK’s BMT Group Ltd. The new research project comes at a time of rapidly increasing Arctic navigation as northern sea routes become navigable for longer periods each year. This offers significant efficiency gains on routes between Asia and Europe, for example, but also poses new challenges in ship design and operation.
SEDNA will tackle these issues in three principal ways. One, it will develop the ‘Safe Arctic Bridge’ to focus on navigational requirements including ice, weather and a lack of chart data. Two, anti-icing systems for ships’ superstructures will be researched and developed to prevent stability problems and ensure that all deck equipment is usable at all times. And three, SEDNA will develop a risk-based design framework for ship safety, including the definition of hazard scenarios, their likelihood and possible consequences. This will specifically examine ice loads and their effects on ships.
The other partners in the project besides BMT Group are University College London, Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden), Atkitektur – og designhøgskolen i Oslo (Norway), University of Southampton (UK), MET Office (UK), Cork Institute of Technology (Ireland), Aalto University (Finland), Lloyd’s Register EMEA (UK), Aker Arctic Technology Inc. (Finland), Stena Rederi AB (Sweden), Dalian University of Technology (China) and Harbin Engineering University (China).