Lloyd’s Register to Develop Trimaran Rules for U.K. Royal Navy

Lloyd's Register has been contracted by the U.K. MoD Sea Technology Group to develop a set of technical rules that will cover the design and operation of multi-hull vessels including trimarans. The development will use data that has been collected from the two-year trials programme carried out by the UK MoD and the US DoD on RV Triton, the QinetiQ-owned research vessel. The need to provide a set of Rules that will significantly reduce the risks in the development of designs for such future projects as the UK's Future Surface Combatant or the US Focused-Mission Ship is key to achieving the benefits that multi-hull warships offer. With the more complex hull response from torsional effects of side hulls, a method of designing this type of vessel, without the need to build complex finite element models, is one of the major challenges facing ship designers. By providing a simplified process that uses proven data embedded in empirical formulae, designers can obtain a robust design in a much shorter timeframe. Advanced tools can then be used to refine innovative designs, with confidence that the general design is sound. The Trimaran Rules will complement the existing Lloyd's Register Rules for Naval Vessels that are now uniquely being applied to a range of new and in service front line naval vessels for maintenance in Lloyd's Register class. With significant commercial interest in vessels with similar hull forms, including Pentamarans, the embedding of military research findings in public domain technical standards offers similar lower risks for other projects.