This blog post looks at the challenges and overcoming process faced by the Korean shipbuilding and marine industry as it transitions to high-value offshore structures.
Every Korean has heard the anecdote about the late Chung Ju-yung, the founder of Hyundai, showing a Greek shipowner a bill with a turtle ship on it to win the order for the ship. But what most people don’t know is that the shipyard was not built in Korea at the time of the ship order. He built the shipyard at the same time as he built the ship. In the conservative shipbuilding industry, where trust is considered very important, this unbelievable story of receiving a ship order just because of a turtle ship drawing was the beginning of the world’s best shipyard, the Korean shipyard. It is an anecdote that is worthy of the term “reckless courage,” but in fact, the shipbuilding and marine industry today is a highly developed technology-intensive industry. And at the center of it all is marine engineering. This article will explain what marine engineering is. To do so, we will first briefly look at the name “marine engineering.” We will also look at the research subjects of marine engineering, which are distinguished in relation to other engineering fields, and we will look at the two engineering problems that marine engineering deals with. Furthermore, we will discuss the current state of the marine industry, which is the foundation of marine engineering.
The name “shipbuilding and marine engineering” can be divided into two parts: “shipbuilding” and “marine.” Shipbuilding engineering is the study of ships, and marine engineering is the study of marine structures. In other words, shipbuilding and marine engineering is the study of engineering problems of all marine structures, including ships, that exist on the sea. Let me explain what specific problems are being explored through a comparison.
Let’s compare the crude oil tanker, one of the products of the shipbuilding and marine industry, to the human body. The engine is the heart of the tanker. Just as blood vessels supply blood to the body from the heart, numerous piping facilities are installed inside the tanker. The engine and piping are the domain of mechanical engineering. In addition, the human body is made up of various organs, which are connected by nerves. Similarly, an oil tanker has various equipment such as oil tanks and navigation devices, which are connected by wires to supply power and control them. This power distribution system is the domain of electrical engineering. Finally, the hull, the ship’s skeleton that encompasses all of this, is the domain of shipbuilding and marine engineering.
There is nothing more frustrating than building a ship and then having it sink instead of floating. Making a ship float is the most important problem in shipbuilding and marine engineering. For a ship to float, it must receive a force equal to the weight of the ship in the opposite direction of gravity. This force is called buoyancy. The amount of buoyancy that an object receives is equal to the weight of the water it pushes out. This is the Archimedes principle, and designing a hull that can properly receive buoyancy according to this principle is the first problem that shipbuilding and marine engineering deals with. Considering buoyancy like this is a feature unique to shipbuilding and marine engineering that cannot be found in other engineering fields.
Once the ship is afloat, the next problem is to make the ship go well or to make the offshore structure stay in place well. The former is for ships and the latter is for offshore structures. Anyone who has walked in a swimming pool will know that it is much harder to walk in water than out of it. This is because water is much denser than air and therefore provides greater resistance. Since ships and offshore structures spend their entire lives on the water, research into underwater movement is essential. Moreover, ships and offshore structures are not floating in a pool with calm water, but in the ocean with waves. Ships must navigate while cutting through the waves, and offshore structures must remain in place while being hit by waves. The challenge of shipbuilding and marine engineering is not only to achieve this level of athletic performance, but also to create a robust structure that can withstand the waves for the lifetime of the ship or offshore structure.
All engineering is inevitably influenced by the industries on which it is based. Recently, high-value-added ships and offshore structures such as drill ships, LNG carriers, and offshore plants have emerged as the main products of the Korean shipbuilding and marine industry. A drill ship is a ship equipped with equipment for drilling deep-sea oil wells. An LNG carrier is a ship that transports liquefied natural gas, and it can be described as a petrochemical plant at sea.
The reason why high-value-added vessels and offshore structures are emerging is that the Chinese shipbuilding industry is launching a low-priced volume offensive with the strong support of the Chinese government. In the case of relatively easy-to-build vessels such as oil tankers, the industry is losing out in price competition with China, and profits are also gradually decreasing due to rising labor costs in Korea. Under these circumstances, the shipbuilding and marine industry in Korea is striving to increase its share of the high-value-added offshore structure market, which is technologically superior to China. As part of this effort, the department is training talented individuals with a background in marine engineering. In other words, while the technology required for shipbuilding, in other words, shipbuilding engineering, was previously more important, marine engineering for the construction of marine structures is now more important. In line with this trend, the Department of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering at Seoul National University has been strengthening its marine engineering-related courses and creating a new curriculum since the 2014 academic year.
So far, we have looked at ship and marine engineering in general and briefly looked at the new trends in the ship and marine industry, which is the foundation of ship and marine engineering. To recap, ship and marine engineering is the study of ships and all other structures on the sea. The core task of ship and marine engineering is to design structures so that they can move or stay in one place while floating on the sea. Finally, he said that the emphasis on marine engineering has become more important in shipbuilding and marine engineering as the base industry, the shipbuilding and marine industry in Korea, has shifted its focus to the marine industry. However, the offshore industry market is more conservative than the shipbuilding industry market, so the barriers to entry are very high. For this reason, Korean shipbuilding and offshore companies, which entered the offshore industry later, are not able to participate in the design stage, which is where the most profit is made, and are only receiving orders for the manufacturing and assembly sectors, which have lower profit margins. Overcoming this situation and moving beyond a shipbuilding powerhouse to become a maritime powerhouse may not be possible without a miracle, as in the anecdote of Chairman Chung Ju-yung. However, this is the wave that the Korean shipbuilding and marine engineering and shipbuilding industries must overcome today. This time, I believe that it will be the ready skills, not the reckless courage, that will bring about another miracle.
