Nippon Paint Marine and Lloyd’s Register Advisory, a leading provider of independent ship performance consultancy to the maritime industry, signed a technical collaboration agreement that will assess the long-term speed loss performance of Nippon Paint Marine’s FASTAR and AQUATERRAS coatings.

The independent evaluation by Lloyd’s Register Advisory will enhance confidence in the hull coatings’ performance over time and establish a benchmark for assessing and comparing coating and vessel performance that can support decision-making for the future.

The project will cover a broad range of vessels coated with FASTAR or AQUATERRAS, including container carriers, bulk carriers, tankers, VLCCs, PCCs, and cruise vessels. As hull fouling varies greatly depending on the vessel route and its operating profile, assessing vessels across many different sectors is crucial to creating an accurate understanding of speed loss performance as well as fuel and emissions reduction, and enabling shipowners to select optimal hull coatings for their vessels.

To create a validated database for assessing coating performance over time, Lloyd’s Register’s modelling will combine multiple data sources as required, including noon reports or high-frequency vessel data, AIS tracking, and metocean data, in accordance with the ISO 19030 standard.

Following the ISO 19030 procedure, the resistance contributions caused by environmental effects will be isolated, allowing the coating performance to be evaluated throughout the assessment period. This analysis will demonstrate the effectiveness of the hull coatings and quantify how hull degradation contributes to speed loss.

The technical collaboration will cover Nippon Paint Marine’s leading hull coatings: AQUATERRAS, the world’s first biocide-free fouling protection coating, which uses patented polymer technology and hydrophilic and hydrophobic micro-domain structures; and FASTAR, a low-friction, self-polishing antifouling coating, which uses a unique hydrophilic and hydrophobic nanodomain (nanotechnology) resin structure in the coating film, and is the latest technology in Nippon Paint Marine’s HydroSmoothXT™ range.

“We look forward to working with Nippon Paint Marine to develop this technical collaboration and realize an independent assessment for their hull coating performance,” says Goh Chung Hun, Lloyd’s Register strategic business partner (Singapore). “Our technical expertise and impartiality underpin our commitment to delivering analyses to the highest standard. We are delighted that Nippon Paint Marine has placed their trust in us to provide a performance verification assessment of their hull coatings.”

“We are committed to helping our customers to achieve their net-zero carbon ambitions, and deliver efficiencies and sustainability within their operations,” Gladys Goh, president of Nippon Paint Marine, adds. “Trust and proof in performance and return on investment is a critical element in driving the uptake of clean technologies across the shipping industry. Working with Lloyd’s Register to rigorously verify the effectiveness of our hull coatings solutions is an essential step in this process.”