Tom Stieghorst
Is there any reason for travel agents or their clients to care about something called the parabolic ultra-bow?
That's the name bestowed by Celebrity Cruises on a new innovation so secret that to date the line has not shown the full bow of its Celebrity Edge ship, due in Fort Lauderdale in November, in any renderings or photos.
Pretty hot stuff, right?
On a trip for the media and select travel agents last week at the shipyard in St. Nazaire, France, Celebrity president Lisa Lutoff-Perlo and Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. chairman Richard Fain began taking the wraps off the parabolic ultra-bow.
What it turns out to be is a refinement of the bulbous bow that most oceangoing ships have used since the 1980s to move more smoothly through the waves.
According to Fain, the plain bulbous bow has now had its day. Once, the bulb was useful for breaking through waves. "You ended up with a ship that had the bulbous bow to create the outer-phase wave and then you had the bow cutting through. But essentially the water came in to something that was U-shaped," Fain said.
"Today we have gotten so efficient with the hydrodynamics that the main constraint is not breaking through the waves, it's the friction of the hull against the water," Fain said.
To address that, engineers at Celebrity and the Chantiers de l'Atlantique shipyard came up with a casing with a parabolic shape that encapsulates the bulb on the bow of the Edge. Also, the shape of the bow as it rises toward the deck is much closer to vertical than the raked bows of the past.
What's the big deal? Fuel savings. Although Fain wouldn't be specific about how much the parabolic ultra-bow contributes, he said that the Edge ships will be 25% more energy-efficient than Celebrity's Solstice class.
That could, in theory, lower costs and prices for cruises.
Something similar happened in the aviation business over the past 20 years. Remember when the wings on jetliners just ended? Now almost all of them have blades at the tip called winglets that reduce air vortices that spin off the end of the wings.
That has cut fuel consumption about 4% to 6%, or some 100,000 gallons a year on a Boeing 737-700.
So numbers like that are why you're likely to be hearing more about the parabolic ultra-bow in the weeks to come.