Cost analysis of chemical tankers and determination of the optimal dimensions

Maritime transportation sector is rapidly growing depending on the globally increasing World trade ratio. Chemical tanker shipping, which is one of the most important branch of maritime transportation, is increasing in parallel with this development. Whether the aim in trade is profitability, in the competitive market, the first condition of maximising profitability is to own a fleet that was built with minimum cost.As is well known, ship building project consists of many interdependent parameters to be optimized in terms of engineering. Implementation of a project is possible when it is financially economical. Since ship building projects require high levels of financing; making detailed cost analysis of these projects and building ships with minimum cost at both building and business process is the basic engineering problem. On the other hand, price fluctuations daily seen in the global economic system, necessitates to define the costs of ship building projects as accurate as possible at preliminary design level.In this thesis, approximate formulas are derived in order to estimate the main dimensions, weight components and costs of the chemical tankers which are less than 30000 DWT. Utilizing these obtained formulas with systematic analysis method, an approach is presented in order to determine the optimal dimensions based on minimum building costs of chemical tankers which has different speed and DWT.