Safe and efficient tank cleaning of liquid cargo tankers: a review

ABSTRACT

Tank cleaning is an important work in the operations of liquid cargo tankers, which plays an important role in connecting the loading and unloading of cargoes during two voyages. This paper summarises the research on safe and efficient tank cleaning for liquid cargo tankers. It first introduces the basic process of tanker cleaning operations of liquid cargo tankers and the relevant requirements of convention and standard. Then, from two aspects of the safety and timeliness of tank cleaning, the main factors affecting the safety and cleaning effectiveness of tank cleaning operations of liquid cargo tankers are summarised, and the research status and effects of these influencing factors are analysed and summarised respectively. Finally, combined with the current research status, the challenges and development prospects of safe and efficient tank cleaning operations are proposed. It has implications for researchers in conducting future research on tank cleaning of liquid cargo tankers.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Liquid cargo tankers
• tank cleaning
• safety
• efficiency
• influencing factors

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authors contributions

W.Q. Wu: Conceptualisation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Supervision, Writing – preparation, original draft, review; Z.X. Cao: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Data curation; B. Zhang: Funding acquisition, Supervision, Writing – preparation; Y.F. Guo: Formal analysis, Writing – preparation, methodology; M. Du: Data curation; Q.G. Zheng: Investigation, Data curation; Z.A. Bai: Project administration; Z.X. Shi: Visualisation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by High-Tech Ship Project of Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the PR China (Grant number 2019-360-4) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51879025, 52271358).