There is a need for more sustainability in the transport industry. To reduce freight traffic on road it is necessary to shift cargo load on train or inland water transportation. This demand is supported at national, international and European level. However, to make the things more difficult, especially inland water transportation is also faced with an increasing occurrence of climatic extremes, such like very hot and dry summers. According to that, there are long times low water levels in the rivers, forcing inland sailors to reduce their cargo load. Therefore, it is a lot to do, to make inland water transportation more appealing.

In a project funded by the Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie (BMWi), the aim was to enable inland container vessels to load and unload containers in the port, independently, using its own handling unit. The resulting additional mass of the crane unit should be compensated by lightweight design on the ship's hull. The task was mastered by a consortium consisting of shipbuilders, crane and steel constructors as well as two Fraunhofer Institutes. Results, got there, can also help to make ship hulls lighter in other projects.

To achieve the aim of mass reduction, adaptations in the structure of ship hull were made, so that in a second step lightweight materials like aluminium foam-sandwiches could be integrated. The adaptation include a separation from load-carrying parts and inferior parts in the structure. Secondary components from a structural point of view are, for example, the walls and covers of ballast tanks, which make up large parts of the ship's hull. Sandwich elements, in this case with an aluminium foam core, are ideal for this. They have a large area moment of inertia and can easily dissipate bending loads, such as those caused by water pressure. So a mass reduction of 20% for a load-section was achieved, for the whole vessel 50-60 tons seems to be possible.