As pressure grows to balance operational efficiency with environmental performance, understanding vessel wash is becoming increasingly important. Applying advanced wavelet analysis reveals subtle changes in wake behaviour across different operating regimes, vessel characteristics, and water depths, demonstrating a powerful new approach to assessing wash impacts and supporting more informed vessel operation and waterway management.

As emissions regulations continue to tighten, the maritime industry is placing greater emphasis on understanding and reducing engine-related air pollution. Advanced numerical modelling is providing a faster and more cost-effective way to assess emissions-control strategies, highlighting the trade-offs involved in reducing NOx while balancing impacts on overall combustion performance and engine efficiency.

Designing non-transport vessels for long service lives is complicated by evolving market conditions, operational demands, and stakeholder expectations. By applying Epoch-Era Analysis, this work demonstrates how future uncertainty can be incorporated into early-stage design decisions, helping designers evaluate changeability, adaptability, and long-term value rather than optimising solely for immediate requirements.

As CFD emerges as a powerful tool for analysing ship manoeuvring in restricted waters, it is providing new insights into the complex hydrodynamic interactions between vessels, rudders, and channel boundaries. Industry discussion supports the potential of numerical methods to improve understanding of bank effects, while highlighting the importance of incorporating factors such as propeller action, shallow-water conditions, free-surface effects, and experimental validation to ensure reliable application in navigational safety and ship-handling practice.

As coastal communities face increasing exposure to storm impacts and extreme sea states, accurately predicting wave set-up is becoming essential for reliable hazard assessment and coastal infrastructure design. By developing a new framework for estimating wave set-up under random wave conditions, this research highlights the significant influence of wave-spectrum characteristics on coastal water levels and demonstrates the practical application of the method using real-world measurements from diverse coastal environments.

Understanding when water should be considered “shallow” is becoming increasingly important as vessel efficiency, safety, and environmental performance come under greater scrutiny. By examining a broad range of hydrodynamic indicators, this research challenges the traditional reliance on depth alone and proposes a more comprehensive framework for characterising shallow-water effects, supporting improved vessel operations, route planning, and wash management.

As offshore wind development accelerates across European waters, the installation of increasingly large foundation structures is presenting new geotechnical and construction challenges. Alternative installation technologies are therefore gaining attention, with trench cutter methods offering a potential solution for sites where conventional pile driving is constrained by hard ground conditions, helping to improve the reliability and efficiency of offshore wind farm construction.

As innovative multi-hull concepts continue to emerge, designers are increasingly seeking rapid and reliable methods to evaluate performance during the earliest design stages. By applying artificial neural network techniques to resistance prediction, this study demonstrates how data-driven models can accelerate the preliminary design of Tri-SWACH vessels, offering a promising alternative to more time-consuming experimental and computational approaches.

As ships age in service, material degradation can progressively erode structural strength, even when the loss of mechanical properties appears relatively modest. By examining the long-term reduction in the yield and tensile strength of high-tensile shipbuilding steel, this study demonstrates how ageing and corrosion-related deterioration can significantly increase the probability of hull girder failure, underscoring the importance of incorporating material degradation into structural integrity assessments, maintenance planning, and lifecycle risk management.

Virtual Arrival is gaining recognition as a practical operational strategy for improving voyage efficiency by aligning ship arrival times with actual port availability. Industry discussion suggests that, beyond reducing fuel consumption, emissions, and congestion, slower transit may also lessen hull and propeller fouling associated with prolonged periods at anchor, highlighting the broader operational benefits of integrating voyage optimisation with vessel performance management.

As autonomous technologies become increasingly important in the maritime sector, dedicated research platforms are playing a crucial role in advancing underwater vehicle capabilities. The development of the Delphin2 AUV demonstrates how innovative vehicle design, autonomous navigation, and low-cost experimentation can support both operational research and workforce development, highlighting the growing significance of autonomous systems in future marine exploration, inspection, and monitoring applications.

As ships age and structural demands evolve over their service life, incorporating uncertainty into strength assessment is becoming increasingly important. This study presents a practical probabilistic approach for evaluating grillage buckling strength under compressive loading, accounting for variations in structural geometry and material properties over time. By providing results with accuracy comparable to more advanced Monte Carlo simulations, the method offers a straightforward and accessible tool for reliability-based structural assessment and lifecycle integrity management.