Application of Generator-Electric Motor System for Emergency Propulsion of a Vessel in the Event of Loss of the Full Serviceability of the Diesel Main Engine

Abstract

Oil tanker disasters have been a cause of major environmental disasters, with multi-generational impacts. One of the greatest hazards is damage to the propulsion system that causes the ship to turn sideways to a wave and lose stability, which in storm conditions usually leads to capsizing and sinking Despite the perceived consequences of maritime disasters in the current solutions for the propulsion of oil tankers, there are no legal or real solutions for independent emergency main propulsion in this type of ship. Stressing that the reliability of the propulsion system has a significant impact on the ship’s safety at sea, the authors presented a new solution in the form of a power take-off/power take-in (PTO/PTI) system. This is the emergency use of a shaft generator as the main electric motor, operating in parallel in a situation when the main engine (ME), (the main engine of the ship’s direct high-power propulsion system that is slow-speed) loses the operational capability to propel the ship. Since one cause of wear, or failure, of the main engines is improper operational decisions, the paper shows the wear mechanism in relation to the accuracy of operational decisions. Using classical reliability theory, it also shows that the use of the proposed system results in an increase in the reliability of the propulsion system. The main topic of the paper was the use of an electrical system called PTO/PTI as an emergency propulsion system on the largest commercial vessels, such as bulk carriers and crude oil tankers, which has not been used before in maritime technical solutions. Semi-Markov processes, continuous in time, discrete in states, and which are used in technology, were also proposed as a tool describing the process of the operation of such a ship propulsion system, and they are useful to support operational decisions affecting the state of the technical condition of the engine. There are two ship operation strategies that can be adopted: the four-state model, for normal operation, and the three-state model, which operates with the occurrence of failure. For these types of models, their limiting distributions were defined in the form of probabilities. It was also demonstrated that faster than expected engine wear and the occurrence of inoperability of the main engine can be caused by wrong operational decisions made by the shipowner or crew. Using this type of main engine operating methodology, it is possible to support the decision of the engineer to stop the main engine and to subject it to the process of restoration to an acceptable state of technical condition (before the failure or during the failure in severe storm conditions), with the parallel use of the proposed electric propulsion (PTO/PTI) as an emergency propulsion, giving the crew a chance to maintain the steering necessary to maintain safe lateral stability.