Ballast water management in tankers

Marine transport allows economical transportation of large quantities of cargo via ships which carry ballast water, when unloaded, to safely manage their voyages and to have stability/strength values, similar to that when loaded. Tankers in particular are the main actors transferring millions of different types of living organisms, since they carry ballast waters in enormous amounts. Living organisms in the ballast water from the coastal waters where the biodiversity is at the maximum, when discharged at the destination port, become invasive in an environment where they have no predator and food stock is abundant, thus causing extensive ecological and economical problems. International Maritime Organization stated exchange methods and the acceptable amounts of living organisms in the ballast water, after the use of onboard treatment systems in the ?International Ballast Water Management Convention? that aimed controlling the transfer of living organisms. Ballast water reception facilities, are recommended by the Convention to be established on-shore, are considered to be a management alternative. Thus, the dissertation includes work on determining the capacity of a ballast water reception/treatment facility which planned to be built in a refinery port with high tanker traffic. The tonnages of the arriving ships, operation time and the amount of ballast water they bring were obtained as data. With the statistical analysis of the gathering data, the suitable distribution was determined and new datasets generated by using the parameters of the distribution. The capacity of projected facility is prepared by using mass curve (ripple diagram) method with the new datasets.