Maritime & Marine
Published: August 7, 2023 | Updated: 15th November 2023
The traditional way to develop a new technology is through empirical testing, which sees a company make a prototype, test it, then tweak and create a new prototype.
That’s not how Portsmouth’s BAR Technologies does it though.
As John Cooper, the company’s CEO, explained: “We’ve developed a lot of really powerful toolsets. We can make a digital twin of a boat, or a problem, then split that into its constituent parts.
“We can then look at the whole model holistically and think ‘if we change this part, what does that do to the performance of the new combined model?
“We then combine this with a series of neural networks we’ve designed to bombard design tools for possible candidate designs. The common theme with all our vessels and technology is that a human hasn’t designed any of them.”
As well as offering this service on a consultancy basis, BAR Technologies has used the same methods to develop products of its own, with the company working across three different areas.
The first of these is WindWings, which combines wind propulsion with route optimisation to save one and a half tonnes of fuel per wing every day.
BAR Technologies’ WindWings can be installed on existing cargo ships to cut the amount of fuel which needs to be burnt each day
The first ship with these installed is currently being prepared to launch in China, with a second vessel in the works which will be the world’s most powerful sailing cargo ship.
BAR Technologies’ second product is its Foil Optimisation and Stability System (FOSS), which combines the cutting-edge active hydrofoil technology with advanced hull hydrodynamic optimisation, improving efficiency, handling and sea keeping.
The SpiritBARTech35EF, fitted with this technology, recently became the fastest electric-powered vessel to complete the Round the Island challenge, circumnavigating the Isle of Wight.
The SpiritBARTech35EF
The third area BAR Technologies is focusing on at the moment is crew transfer vessels, which are used to take technicians to floating wind turbines in the North Sea.
“The common thread in everything we do is decarbonisation,” John explained. “And it’s the simulation toolsets which allow us to do that.
“The vast majority of crew transfer vessels in the north sea are catamarans, and the problem they have is that the two hulls are rigid, with a big displacement, so when one hull lifts the other goes down with big vertical accelerations.
“We looked at it and asked what it needs to do – it needs to be efficient, because if you’re going to service turbines you should use less fuel to do it, and it should get the workers there nice and fresh so they can climb the tower without being concerned about sea sickness.
The BAR Tech 30 has been designed to take turbine technicians to floating wind turbines and is currently on operation in the North Sea
“If you plug those parameters into a design tool, and look at the problem in a different way, you get a different answer. With that particular problem we’ve designed a vessel with a very long main hull and a torpedo outrigger. It reduces fuel burn by 30 per cent and vertical accelerations by 70 per cent.
“From there it’s looking at it and deciding ‘is this too out-there, or can it be built?’.
The other standout feature of BAR Technologies is systems control.
“With almost everything we do there’s a lot happening under the water.
“There are some pretty hefty foils moving quite fast and reacting to sensors, sea states and predicted sea states.
“Our unique selling points are a combination of maths and systems control.”
These differences have the company to have different employment priorities to traditional naval architects.
“Of the around 45 people we employ, about 10 of those are mathematicians – they’re very good problem solvers.
And this is not a role John, who qualified as an accountant, necessarily expected to find himself in.
He started his career working for EY, before moving to Avis and then MacLaren Racing, where he spent 15 years, charged with bartering Formula One goodies for cutting edge technology for the car.
It was in discussion with BAR’s current chairman, Martin Whitmarsh, that the seeds for his future career would be sewn.
“We were talking and we both thought that, while we’re having tremendous fun racing two cars around the world every second week, and spending several hundred million, we should be doing more for the automotive industry and for society.
“From here we set up MacLaren Applied Technologies, taking the technology developed for the race cars and commercialising it.
“Martin left in 2014 to do the Americas Cup cycle with Ben Ainsley, based in Portsmouth, but we kept talking and while I didn’t go to work there immediately when they set up the technologies business in 2019 I moved across.
“I’m really proud of the journey of all the people working here. We’ve got a huge talent pool and it’s my job to help them direct their focus.
“They also didn’t have a lot of patents when I joined, so I set about ensuring commercial protection and bringing the technologies to market.
“I think one of my best moments so far has been recently when one of my engineers sent me a video of the WindWings going up for the first time in China. I can’t stop watching it, it gives me goosebumps.”
