Design and Fabrication of Fiber Reinforced Boat in Eritrea

Abstract

Transportation through water body is the cheapest and the most important way of transportation system in human life. Eritrea has a wide range of coastal area along Red Sea and it is obvious that those people who live in the coastal area were used to fishing. Wood is one of the easiest and ancient materials that have been utilized for the construction of boats and it also remains as a favorite one for many professionals, but the boats which were constructed of woods were much heavier in their light weight, therefore they couldn't carry more loads. Scarcity and high price of the timber along with the high annual repair and maintenance cost will reduce the income of the boatmen and also increased consumption of timber will results in faster deforestation.

In this situation, various alternative materials like ferrocement, aluminium, fibre reinforced glass and fibre reinforced concrete has been used as an alternative material for construction of boats. So, our first work in the fabrication of the boat is to choose the alternative material for fabricating a vessel.

Plywood has lots of advantages like they are stiffer than boards of equal thickness of regular lumber. Due to the stiffness of the plywood panels, weight can be saved by replacing the regular lumbar by plywood, which is an important problem faced in both power and sail boats. Fiber glass along with resins has many advantages like thermal insulation, electrical insulation, reinforcement, heat and corrosion resistant and easily recyclable for future purposes.

This technique of fabrication will give good results by reducing the problems with leakage and bio fouling of hull surface due to marine growth such as barnacles and in turn which increases the life span of the hull surface of the boats. So this work will be useful for those communities who are working with the boats for their transportation and fishing activities and it also improves the standard of the fisherman and their activities. By design and constructing a boat with plywood and FRG, the quality and standard of the boat will be improved along with a certain degree of safety. As a student of marine engineering department, this research work increase the knowledge about design software’s like solid works and delft ship, design parameters of a vessel and all the fabrication procedures of the boat by using fiber reinforced glass in combination with plywood.