Vard Marine and ILS Ship Design & Engineering have agreed to collaborate on designing icebreakers for the global market
They intend to jointly develop ice-breaking design solutions for newbuildings and ship conversions and provide shipbuilders, owners and operators with fit-for-purpose and sustainable vessel designs.
One area of co-operation will be to further develop and implement ILS’ patented Detachable IceBreaking Bow (DIBB) design in new markets. The ILS DIBB has an independent power plant allowing ice breaking to become a modular capability that can be added to ships as and when required instead of building ice-breaking capabilities into a vessel with all the size, weight, cost and efficiency impacts this implies.
The first DIBB began operating last winter in east Finland’s lake district. Ice-breaking bow Saimaa was attached to Alfons Håkans’ tug Calypso to create sea lanes for shipping through thick winter ice in Q1 2021.
ILS said DIBB’s unique capabilities overcome many of the drawbacks of earlier approaches to designing and implementing detachable bows.
Vard Marine has developed the conversion designs for the Canadian Coast Guard’s medium icebreakers from an original ILS hull design. These ships are now some of the Canadian Coast Guard’s most powerful and effective assets. The Canadian Government has also recently announced that two polar icebreakers will be built in Canada to VARD’s 9 206 design.
Vard Marine chief executive Wade Carson said this agreement with ILS will “assist both companies in helping clients to identify their needs and provide the designs that address these.”
ILS chief executive Kristian Lehtonen added this co-operation agreement will “further expand our horizons”. During the last five years, ILS has carried out design and consulting work in 14 countries.
Vard Marine is an independent naval architecture and marine engineering consultancy headquartered in Canada, but part of the Vard Group, which is owned by global shipbuilding group Fincantieri.
ILS was established in 1988 and its icebreaker designs were used for Fennica, Nordica, Botnica, the Tor Viking class, Finnish Navy’s oil spill response vessel Louhi and the new LNG-fuelled icebreaker Polaris, operated by Arctia.
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