Brittany Ferries flagship Pont-Aven fitted with duck tail
Stern view of Pont-Aven showing her newly fitted duck tail (Source: Brittany Ferries)
During Brittany Ferries flagship Pont-Aven’s drydocking at Poland’s Remontowa Shiprepair in Gdansk, between November 2023 and January 2024, the RoPax ferry was fitted with a duck tail on her stern to improve fuel efficiency, thereby increasing the 2004-built vessel’s length by 3m.
The new duck tail will improve Pont-Aven’s hydrodynamic performance and, hopefully, result in a 10% reduction in fuel consumption once the ferry returns to service. Pont-Aven is currently lying alongside in the French port of Le Havre.
The ferry’s duck tail project started with Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulations developed at French shipbuilder Chantier de l’Atlantique, in St. Nazaire. Initially, design engineers considered modifying the vessel’s bow. However, twelve proposed design tweaks to the bow area were examined, but all revealed little benefit in terms of fuel savings. So the attention turned to the ferry’s stern design.
“When we looked at improvement in the stern design, the results of the CFD simulations were far more promising,” said Brittany Ferries Research & Project Manager, Brice Robinson. “In fact, the date pointed to a significant reduction of around 10% with the addition of a duck tail, which was very exciting.”
The next step was to put theory to the test and Brittany Ferries carried out ship model tank tests at Hamburg’s Ship Model Basin (HSVA). This was where Pont-Aven’s hull had originally been tested in 2002, by the vessel’s builder, Germany’s Meyer Werft. Original design drawings of the ferry allowed for a 7m scale model of the vessel’s hull to be re-crafted, complete with stern modifications.
In total, three different duck tail shapes were tested, all of which backed-up data from the CFD simulations, Having identified the most efficient duck tail design, work was then started to coincide with Pont-Aven’s planned drydocking in Gdansk, which began in November 2023.
Meanwhile, Brittany Ferries has turned to its drive train partner, Wärtsilä, to boost the propulsion efficiency of the ferry even further, with the partners are now looking at improved propeller designs. This could lead to offer a further improvement of around 5% of propulsion efficiency, when retrofitted to Pont-Aven at a later date.
