Innovation Winter 2025/26

HaiSea Wamis battery room. P hoto : H ai S ea M arine

overheating or physical damage that can lead to fire. “Thermal runaway isn’t about the flames; it’s about heat generation,” Turner explained. “You effectively need a

way to cool the fire, and you can’t really do that with chemical systems.” The team worked closely with Transport Canada and classification societies to validate the containment and suppression systems. “Everything is reviewed by class: containment, suppression, compartmentalization. It’s all part of the design loop,” Phillips said. Behind the design work is a long-lasting focus on naval modelling and computational analysis, which helps the team validate the dynamics of the systems. “We were one of the first adopters of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in tug design,” Phillips said. “Now, classification societies actually accept our CFD results in place of physical testing for escort performance.” Specializing in modelling has allowed the team to test and design configurations that haven’t existed before, and to better understand different elements of the systems, from hydrodynamic stability to even acoustic modelling. This element is particularly important because the naval industry often divides naval design and manufacturing components. RAL’s final deliverable is typically a design-guidance drawing, which communicates the functional design of a tugboat and provides enough details for regulatory approval. Then, it’s up to shipyards, like Sanmar Shipyards in Türkiye, to execute these drawings with more detailed field specifications, in consultation with tugboat owner teams and RAL engineers. That means RAL’s engineers must rely extensively on CFD to understand, improve, and predict tugboat behaviour. “Sometimes, a little vibration or an interesting hydrodynamic phenomenon might make it so that the boat’s not tracking in the water quite the way that was

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Winter 2025/26

Innovation