Case study · Marine engineering · Polar class
Polar Max is the new heavy polar icebreaker programme for the Canadian Coast Guard — a joint build between Helsinki Shipyard and Chantier Davie. PC2 means operating year-round in ice over 2.5 metres thick. willbö is inside the machinery spaces.
Detailed outfitting engineering — 3D model, isometrics, fabrication drawings — delivered in AVEVA E3D and integrated with both yards' master model. The ship is engineered in Finland, finished in Québec, and built to spend its life breaking the Canadian Arctic.
Programme · two-yard build
Hietalahti · Helsinki · Finland
A century of icebreaker know-how. Over half of the world's icebreaker fleet has been engineered or built here. Polar Max takes that lineage forward — Helsinki leads the early-stage engineering and modelling.
Lévis · Québec · Canada
Canada's largest shipbuilder. Davie executes the build for the Canadian Coast Guard under the National Shipbuilding Strategy. willbö's machinery-space package integrates directly with Davie's master model.
What willbö does
Detailed outfitting model of the engine rooms and auxiliary machinery spaces — propulsion, electrical, HVAC, piping, supports — natively in AVEVA E3D, federated against the yards' master model.
Production isometrics for piping spools and structural supports — extracted from the 3D model with the bend tables, weld schedules and material take-off the fabrication shops actually need.
Fabrication-ready drawing package — plates, brackets, foundations, penetrations — issued through the yards' release pipeline and aligned to class-society approval cycles.
What this proves for your project
Polar Category 2 means year-round operation in medium multi-year ice — the toughest civilian rating short of nuclear-powered breakers. Material cold-ratings, hull reinforcement consequences inside the engine room, redundancy of every safety-critical system. We don't sub-contract this; we model it ourselves.
Helsinki and Davie work in AVEVA E3D as their master design tool. We model directly inside their environment, not in a parallel CAD that has to be exported and re-imported. That removes a whole class of integration bugs and lets engineering changes propagate at the speed the yards need.
The build is split across Helsinki and Davie. Our package has to sit cleanly inside both their model federations and survive the handover from Finnish lead engineering to Canadian production. That discipline — model hygiene, naming conventions, change control — is the difference between a programme that ships and one that drowns in rework.
The end customer is the Canadian Coast Guard. The schedule, the documentation expectations and the audit trail are public-sector. We work to that bar — class dossier, traceable revisions, evidence of design decisions on file — without slowing the engineering loop down.
Specs · programme reference
| Item | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Heavy polar icebreaker | Government / coast-guard service |
| Operator | Canadian Coast Guard | Government of Canada · NSS programme |
| Yards | Helsinki Shipyard + Chantier Davie | Joint build · Finland · Canada |
| Length overall | 158.2 m | — |
| Breadth | 28.0 m | Wide beam for ice channel |
| Ice class | PC2 | Year-round in medium multi-year ice > 2.5 m |
| Power | 40 MW+ · Azipod propulsion | Diesel-electric plant |
| willbö scope | Detailed outfitting · machinery spaces | 3D model · isometrics · fabrication drawings |
| Tooling | AVEVA E3D | Native model in yards' federation |
| Status | Ongoing · multi-year build | Engineering active across both yards |
More case studies
Polar Max is one of three flagship programmes shaping willbö right now. CN296 Arpaarti Arctica took us into ice class. The Naumon wingsail retrofit took us into wind propulsion. Polar Max takes us into the heaviest polar tier there is.
See all projects →Ice class, multi-yard programmes, machinery-space outfitting in AVEVA E3D — bring the constraint and we'll talk engineering.
julian.fontela@willbo.es →