As you sit around the flickering glow of your computer tonight, nestling in for some YouTube and to write emails, go ahead and pick up one or two things from off your desk and just check where they come from. Honest to God the first three things I picked up came from Asia; what about you?

I would expect you find the same; in fact I bet that it would take quite some hunting around the house to find anything delivered over land (as opposed to having been delivered by container ship). This is because much of what we buy is made someplace else (invariably someplace else that is cheaper) and those places are farther away then what a truck can haul.

	Open deck Mærsk offers an idea of the scale of commerce

Cargo ships have been steadily increasing in size for the last 100 years and since the adoption of the U.S. Dept. of Defense shipping container standards in the 1950’s the ‘Containerization’ of the worlds transport has drastically increased the cost benefit of selling goods on the world market; good for business, maybe not so great for fuel resources.

The problem is that the standard shipping container has not evolved in this same period, they are made the same now as they always have been, corrugated steel, outward opening doors, rigid and in need of a paint every few years of use.

The Cargoshell is a complete rethink of what a shipping container can be, the brainchild of Dutch entrepreneur René Giesbers this container resembles the standard model in size and shape only.

Built from composite materials, the Cargoshell has a weight savings of 25% over steel and can be more efficiently built and repaired.

	Cargoshell agf.nl Fiber plastic composites

This material also provides a layer of insulation while allowing transmission of a signal; this makes satellite tracking of a transponder within one of these containers possible, increasing security.

But the most interesting thing about the Cargoshell is its ability to be folded flat.

That’s right, a stackable shipping container which can be folded or unfolded in about 30 seconds using a crane to lift the top up and lock the walls in place.

Because of this the standard outward opening doors of old steel containers had to be replaced with roller-doors for some loss in strength but with the added benefit of front and back access for packing and unloading.

	Folding Container Cargoshell To reduce fuel use?

Now as cool as a flat-pack shipping container is, the real savings seem to be in the use of the composite materials (fiber reinforced plastic) to reduce weight, maintenance, paint and manufacturing cost because the logic in the other case is a bit wonky.

On first blush it would seem that four container ships of goods could come from Shanghai to LA California, unload and then get folded-up and repacked onto one ship for the homeward journey for more gear, thank you globalization. But, in short order there would be a glut of empty ships filling up off LA’s coast; you see the real problem isn’t the engineering of shipping containers or logistics of freight but the politics of ‘efficiency gains’ realized by off-shoring manufacturing.

	Yes a scale model of the Colosseum Author The idea is that 4 full cargo ships could be reduced to 1 on the return journey. Of course 3 ships could be running 'lite', but the fuel savings are not what is claimed.

	Scale of fuel Author Marine diesel

	Fuel savings? Author If those three unloaded ships were scrapped in LA, then a cube of diesel fuel 25 meters to an edge would be saved; 'steaming' back empty to Shanghai, maybe a third of that is saved.

If a healthy trade relationship exists between sea-bound neighbors, those emptied containers would be filled with goods produced by both countries and containers would pull double-duty moving goods back and forth instead of relaxing on the deck for half the trip. But if politics isn’t your stew, then there is a ‘technical’ way to make this system work; but it requires container ship manufacturers to totally rethink the idea of what a boat is.

If the world shipping system got an overhaul on the order of ‘Containerization’ but for the ships themselves it would be possible to realize something along the lines of the 4:1 savings talked about above. Turning the cargo ‘ship’ into more of a cargo tug and making the containers linkable. The trick would be to have a vehicle totally devoted to power and fuel with no deck space or cargo room at all, a type of ocean locomotive.

For this to work though the containers would have to essentially be sea-worthy and linkable so that massive rafts of containers could hold together and hold themselves afloat for the tug across open water to port. When emptied they get folded down and linked together 4:1 for volume, plus the other locomotives in tow. As crazy as this sounds, it is actually the same transition that took place in realizing the efficiency of train transport systems today.

Either that or make shipping containers one-time-use made of high embedded energy plastics and when buying goods from other countries you also pay for an ‘edible’ shipping container for feeding into power plants at the destination country.

These may sound like some far-fetched ideas to consider but they are not beyond the pale of what is actually being done today in the cargo shipping sector; take for instance B9 shipping. A subsidiary of B9 Energy Group they are currently churning out 3000dwt (dry weight, tonnes) steel-hulled sail/biogas powered container ships in expectations of future market drivers.

	In production B9 Shipping The 3000 tonne sail/biogas (60:40) powered container ship.

Calculations for sketchup:
Emma Mærsk is 400m long and 56m wide and carries 15200, 20-foot-long shipping containers. Emma Mærsk is 114000hp x 0.114kg/hp/hr fuel = 13000kg marine diesel fuel/hr. Diesel fuel weighs about 900grams/liter (900kg/m3) = 14.4m3/hr x 24 = 345m3/day. Cube root of 345 = 7m to an edge.

It is approximately 8700 nautical miles (16,112km) from Shanghai to LA California at cruising speed (25 knots) that distance takes 15 days.15 days times 345m3 Diesel fuel x three empty cargo ships = a cube of 25 meters to each edge.


Via: gizmag

Thanks to AnduinB @ Google 3dwarehouse for use of his Colosseum ... no i did not make a scale model of the Colosseum for this post ; )