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Photo from New Launch

Even if you are thousands of miles from the nearest land you probably didn’t miss the big news in the technology world this week; the launch of iPhone 2.0.

The secret, however, is that you don’t need a new 3G iPhone to get the best features. Simply connect your existing iPhone or iPod Touch to iTunes and click update. Once completed your firmware will update to version 2.0 providing access to the Application Store.

Here are the Top 10 Applications that will be of use to a mariner:

10) Bloomberg Fiance

Have a portfolio of stocks you need to track? Bloomberg’s free iphone application harnesses much of the power of their pricey terminals and displays the results on your iPhone. Charts, company news and fistorical price data are all included. And, yes, you can track the price of oil!

9) Scientific Calculator

This application you don’t have to install. Just click on your iPhone’s calculator and turn the device 90 degrees and the built in 4 function calc turns on the scientific data.

Dial Zero

Sometimes you need to spend your precious moments of port time sorting out your personal finances. Why spend this time listening to a computer tell you to “Press 1 for English…”? Dial zero gives you the codes to jump directly to a representative. Neat, eh!

7) Check Please

While some of you mariners fly high on expense accounts (those guys should try the app Expense2Go), most mariners need to pay for their own meals both in port and at training classes. This application takes the simple Tip Calculator found on many phones and gives it a much needed redesign.

6) Epocrates Rx

We are not doctors and the Medical PIC training most of us have taken simply allows us to administer care under the direction of a doctor. For small problems or when the doctor is talking over your head Epocrates might come in handy. This free drug reference manual lets you access information quickly at the point of care.

5) My Colored Strobe Light

While this application can do everything short of send flashing light messages it’s most basic function will be the most useful on the bridge of your ship. Set the color to to red, adjust the brightness and it turns your iphone into a dim flashlight that won’t ruin your night-vision.

4) Where

In port for only a few hours and want to have a nice diner, do some shopping and maybe pick up a latte? Where gives you restaurant reviews, zipcar locations and will even locate find the cheapest gas station in town.

3) Bank Of America

If you want to have a good chance of doing banking in any port in the world HSBC is by far the best choice but in the US they only have locations in a few states. For American mariners the best choices are Washington Mutual and Bank Of America of which B&A has, by far, the best technology features that make banking from the road a breeze.

2)NetNewsWire

Bandwidth is precious aboard ship so why waste it on gCaptain’s beautifull banners. Instead set up NetNews and subscribe to our RSS feed. This application takes the text and article photos only, displaying then on iphone’s screen in a bandwidth friendly format.

1) Evernote

This application does one thing but does it well! It recognizes handwriting in pictures and lets you search through your notes. This is the perfect application for digitizing and searching the logbook.

Be sure to check out their desktop application too. It has many advance features in an easy to use format and… it’s also FREE.

Runners Up:

This is not a comprehensive list and many other applications will be of use to mariners worldwide. Runners up include translation programs for a half dozen languages, weather applications that give you basic charts from NOAA and web 2.0 offerings like Jott (transcribes voice notes), Truphone (free wi-fi based phone calls) and To-do.

Should I upgrade?

If you need an excuse to upgrade the 3G iphone just tell your significant other “Combining the higher speeds of 3G with the new phone’s GPS will allow it to become a mini ECDIS. Soon I’ll be able to watch the ship navigate down the channel in real time”. While this feature doesn’t exist yet, the phone has all the hardware needed to enable this possibility. It’s just a matter of time for the guys at EarthNC, ActiveCaptain, Jakota Systems and others to write the software to make it happen.

Our favorite competitor in professional mariner news, Marine-Buzz.com, recently had an exceptional post on maritime technology used to launch rockets into space. 

Having seen ships being used as a Hospital, University, Museum, promoting fashion, its time now to see a ship being used as a Platform to launch satellites. Sea Launch is preparing to launch a Zenit-3SL rocket with a Thuraya-3 communication satellite shortly from a floating platform in the Pacific Ocean. To view live web telecast click here.

The Sea Launch is the world’s first ever commercial international project to develop and operate a sea-based space launch system. The main objective of this project is to launch satellites from a mobile sea-based launch platform.

The key advantages of the Sea Launch system over ground launch sites are as follows:

• Ability to launch directly from the equator thus reducing unit costs of their delivery to the target orbit.
• Ability to launch with any azimuth from open sea, thus making launches free of political risks.
• Compactness, no need to have a well-developed ground infrastructure and its associated social support (roads, power, hotels, schools, hospitals, etc.), which radically reduces the numbers of personnel participating in the work, and, therefore, the cost of operation.
• Ability to process spacecraft for launch on the US territory (Long Beach, CA), virtually in an “urban” environment.

Being the closest marine technology company to gCaptain HQ, Sea Launch is a company that interests us greatly… we only wish we had gotten to the story sooner!

You can find MarineBuzz’s exhaustive review of SeaLaunch technology including additional photos HERE.

Eide Marine Tech brings us a new Freefall lifeboat design. In a press release they write:

The lifeboat has a new superstructure design in order to get the water off the superstructure faster than earlier designed freefall lifeboats. And together with the bow, which EMT has used for several years, this will make the entry to the water quite soft.

The lifeboat was designed for use with their innovative freefall davit design. Rather than attempting to describbe the system, here is a drawing that should make the system’s advantages over a traditional free fall system obvious.

If you have any experience with these davits please post a comment with your thoughts.

Our friend Jean Pierre de Lutz is building a new boat using green technology and writing about it on his blog. Knowing we are interested in new technology geared toward reducing ship emissions he pointed us to the European Union funded project METHAPU. Here are the details:

After nearly one and a half years of research and development, the EU-funded METHAPU (‘Validation of renewable methanol based auxiliary power systems for commercial vessels’) project is about to start trials on a prototype of a methanol-based solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) unit. The protoype will be tried and tested for performance and emissions under real-life conditions onboard a car transport vessel involved in international trade.

According to the independent Norwegian organisation Det Norske Veritas (DNV), one of the five project partners, the world’s fleet of ships is the source of two percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, ten percent to 15 percent of nitrous oxides (NOx) and four percent to six percent of sulphur oxides. DNV specialises in risk management in various areas and operates internationally. ‘Fuel cells represent an interesting possible solution to the problem of reducing local and regional emissions,’ the DNV comments in its report on ‘Fuel cells in ships: safety & reliability’. ‘The technology is, however, still fairly unproven.’

This is what the EUR 2 million METHAPU project, to which the EU contributes EUR 1 million, is set to change: The one-year trial will help to assess the maturity of methanol-based technology and its suitability for daily use in the shipping sector.

You can read the full article HERE.

MarineLog brings us info on the new Heavy Lift design by SeaMetric International. The Twin Marine Lifter will consist of 2 DP class 3 heavy transport vessels with a dwt capacity of 25.000 tonnes. They will have accommodations for 41, a helideck, and will be capable of submersion to -20 meters. When used as a heavy lift vessel the two ships will merge and the unit to be transported will be brought in to straddle the two units creating one monster heavy lift ship.

Offshore Shipping Online tells us: [Continue Reading →]

 

 Heavy Lift Ship - Twin Marine Lifter: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

University of Michigan researchers are investigating a radical new design for cargo ships that would eliminate ballast tanks, the water-filled compartments that enable non-native creatures to sneak into the Great Lakes from overseas.

PhysOrg.com is reporting that an alternative to current and proposed tank cleaning methods.

Here’s an excerpt:

“In some ways, it’s more like a submarine than a surface ship,” Parsons said. “We’re opening part of the hull to the sea, creating a very slow flow through the trunks from bow to stern.

“You’re continuously sweeping water through the ship and out,” he said. “So you’re always filled with local sea water, not hauling water from one part of the world to the other.”

The U-M ballast-free ship concept was conceived in 2001 and patented in 2004. It is intended for new-vessel construction only.

The full PhysOrg.com post is here.

(Ed. note: My guess is that this system could be used for cooling as well. A special thanks to BitterEnd reader Cherei in San Antonio for point me to this post.)

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This post was written by Richard Rodriguez, Rescue Tug Captain, and US Coast Guard approved instructor for License Training. You can read more of his articles at the BitterEnd of the net.

IMC has a very complete post on alternative energy ideas for harnessing power from our oceans. They tell us;

Wave power refers to the energy of ocean surface waves and the capture of that energy to do useful work - including electricity generation, desalination, and the pumping of water (into reservoirs). Wave power is a form of renewable energy. Though often co-mingled, wave power is distinct from the diurnal flux of tidal power and the steady gyre of ocean currents. Wave power generation is not a widely employed technology, and no commercial wave farm has yet been established (although development for the first commercial wind farm in the Orkneys are well under way).

Read the full story:

Renewable Energy at Sea: Harnessing Wave Energy

No this isn’t going to be a post about china’s new submarines…. instead we look at designing ships to be quite for more relaxing purposes.

Eurodam News, Holland America’s newbuild blog, shares the secret;

When Zuiderdam, the first Vista-class ship, entered service, it quickly became evident that the aft part of the main restaurant had higher-than-usual noise and vibration levels. On all Holland America ships the aft section of the main restaurant is located above the propellers, but on Vista-class ships the main restaurant was located three decks lower and therefore is closer to the propellers.

Fincantieri engaged Danish consulting company Odegaard & Danneskiold-Samsoe to work with the shipyard’s noise and vibration department to develop a solution. They hit on the idea of installing an air-injection system that would create a cushion of air bubbles between the propellers and the hull to absorb some of the noise frequencies that would otherwise be transferred directly to the hull. A similar system had been installed on private yachts before, but the technology had never been tried on a large cruise vessel.

For the rest of the article click HERE.

This article was originally posted in October 2007

Stealth ships: HMS Helsingborg and HMS Visby. Photo: Peter Nilsson/Kockums AB

The folks at Giz Magazine are reporting scientists at Britannia Royal Navy College are working on a plan to use it to create the ultimate stealth vessel, according to a report in this month’s edition of Physics World.

Here’s a excerpt:

Unlike natural materials, which refract light to the right of the incident beam, metamaterials are “left handed”, refracting light at a negative angle, to the left of the incident beam. This allows scientists to “bend” light around the object, allowing the beams to continue as if the object were not there. Duke University succeeded in bending microwaves around metamaterials in 2006, and in the following year researchers at Ames Laboratory developed a method for bending wavelengths in the visible light spectrum. Scientists predict that invisibility will be possible for objects of any shape and size within the next decade.

For us non technical types, think of a sophisticated form of polarization. For the technically oriented, info on incident beams is here.

The original story in Physics World Magazine the states:

As the Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War — which, dating from around 450 BC, is probably the world’s oldest treatise on military strategy — “all warfare is based on deception.”

Most of us are familiar with the Philadelphia Experiment. Wikipedia states it was an alleged naval military experiment at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, sometime around October 28, 1943, in which the U.S. destroyer escort USS Eldridge was to be rendered invisible to human observers for a brief period of time. It is also referred to as Project Rainbow. The story is widely regarded as a hoax.

I wonder how the 72 ColRegs would treat such a vessel or if could be seen by conventional radar.

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This post was written by Richard Rodriguez, Rescue Tug Captain, and US Coast Guard approved instructor for License Training. You can read more of his articles at the BitterEnd

OPA 90, the legislation enacted after the Exxon Valdez incident mandated double hull technology, essentially wrapping a second hull around the first, on all newly built tankers. While this has been mostly effective and (had it been mandated for use on container ships) would have prevented last year’s San Francisco Oil Spill, it fails to protect the environment during catastrophic groundings. Mo Husain of MH Systems, Inc. has recently worked on perfecting alternative means of “loss of containment” prevention. He tells us:

CONCEPT MADE SIMPLE
Imagine a Straw…

The underpressure concept is best understood by making an analogy with which most people can identify. Imagine sipping water half-way up through a straw and sealing off the top of the straw with your fingertip. A simple principle of hydraulics allows the water to be held in the straw at this level until the finger is released.

This same principle allows oil to be contained within the hull should a rupture occur in the tank. When a tanker is loaded, the oil level inside the tank is higher than the surrounding seawater level. This causes a higher pressure to exist inside the tanker due to hydrostatic pressure. Normally, when a hull is ruptured, the pressure inside forces oil to flow out up to the level of the surrounding seawater (discounting density). Using AUPS, this complete loss would not occur.

The system equalizes the pressure inside and outside the tanker at the rupture point by applying a slight underpressure of 2 to 4 psi in the ullage space of the tank. As oil flows out, it is replaced by seawater up to the rupture point only. Oil loss is held to a minimum as all oil above the rupture point will remain in the tanker. In the event of an accidental grounding bottom rupture, AUPS would prevent virtually all oil spillage from the tanker.

For a comprehensive look at this system click HERE and for the work Mo is doing on Ballast Water Treatment visit his company’s blog found HERE.