industry suggestions for improvement

Hi,
I am currently studying a degree in boat design and for one of my projects i am researching design, and comparing it to the DNV's 'clean Design,' notation; I was wondering if anyone had any ideas of areas i may want to research? I have already had a suggestion of the placement of fuel tanks, i.e within the double skin or not. any help would be great,

 

One thing about the CLEAN DESIGN is no placement of fuel tanks against the skin.

In the past, these spaces might often have been used for fuel storage. But now internal parts of the vessel will be used for fuel. And these internal parts of the ship are not available for the main purposes of the vessel (cargo, equipment etc).

It might be interesting to study how much larger (more internal volume) this factor is making ships. This extra volume requires more steel to enclose. And then it might be interesting to see what effect the increased ship size is having on the installed power and fuel consumption.

You could maybe study this for 2 ship types (offshore support vessel and small coastal ferry), and 2 sizes of each ship.

It is clear that there is a benefit to the environment in not spilling fuel after collisions, but I suspect the cost to the environment (more steel, more fuel consumption) is not insignificant.

I saw an article a few years ago about replacement Isle of Wight ferries, with various claims about how environmentally friendly they were. This was probably true in terms of g/kWhr fuel consumption of the new engines, but what was shocking was how much larger and more powerful the new ships were compared to their predecessors - for basically the same performance.