From the August 1949 Edition
The gas turbine made its initial appearance as a marine propulsion plant in the mid-1950s. The installation of a 6000-horsepower early gas turbine unit on the Liberty ship John Sargeant was a tentative first step that eventually led to the acceptance of the gas turbine as a reliable plant, initially for naval vessels, but eventually commercial installations were made on a limited basis. The pressing worldwide need for energy from natural gas led to the development of liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers for this valuable commodity during the 1950s following the experimental transportation of LNG on the Mississippi River to Chicago and the 1959 first transatlantic voyage of Methane Pioneer. At the time, it was predicted that there would be "a hundred" LNG carriers on the oceans. Today, there are over 225 ships in service and well over 140 on order-some of which can transport fifty times the cargo carried by Methane Pioneer. The introduction of the cellular container ship in 1956, known as the "container revolution," has proven to have been a change in marine transportation that rivals that of the introduction of the steamboat a century and a half before. Although there was widespread skepticism when Ideal-X made her first voyages, within a decade the radical changes that had to be made to ships, to ports worldwide and-most importantly-to the attitudes of the workers affected by these changes, led us to realize what Malcom McLean had wrought. Utilizing the recently learned knowledge of the performance of ship structure at sea, the introduction of the VL (very large) and UL (ultra large) vessel configurations for tankers and bulk carriers from the 1960s and onwards led to altered ocean transportation economics worldwide. The death of the "supertanker" was widely predicted to be one of the legacies of the petroleum crisis of the 1970s, but the overarching costper-ton advantage of that ship type led to a resurgence of large vessel construction. One must ask, "What would a gallon of gasoline cost had we been forced to bury the "supertanker'?" Use of computational fluid dynamics in the design of ships' hulls became an important working tool commencing around the 1980s, supplementing, and in many cases replacing, the use of towed models. Although the concept was developed and used by the aircraft industry, it was soon recognized to be if sigJanuary 2009
nificant value in maritime design. The design and construction of ship structures which minimize environmental damage in the event of accident was a positive aspect of the unfortunate grounding of the tanker Exxon Valdez in 1980. As a result of one of the arguably few legislative acts that serve to improve the quality of ship construction and operation, the double-hulled tank vessel received worldwide recognition in our quest for environmentally friendly ships. (Compiled by William duBarry Thomas)
Al Gattara, a modern LNG carrier.
He fuses his future
in the engine department.
Unlicensed Jr. Engineer George Stevens USNS Lewis and Clark
sealiftcommand.com
www.marinelink.com 35