MATCHING SPEEDS AND FUEL EFFICIENCY
Design of a new cruise ship is based on the routing between the ship’ s home berth and the intended destination ports. The itineraries may, for instance, include longer transits to warmer waters and visiting some islands in these waters. Therefore, the speed and power demand of the ship’ s engines are liable to vary considerably along the route.
In conventional designs, diesel electric power plants run at a constant speed. To match the power production with the actual demand, generators can be called online or dis engaged.
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Up to 2 000 tons of fuel can be saved annually by engine speed optimisation.
Jukova Corporation is one of the leading system suppliers for the passenger transport industry. Jukova’ s long experience in maritime products has been gathered under one product line, Meridian.
A modern cruise ship is typically equipped with four to six main engines. On the grounds of fuel economy, it is preferable to run the ship at certain speeds. In turn, some speed ranges should be avoided as they require the power plant to run at poor efficiency.
Routing and power plant design can be matched so that the speed profile leads to optimised fuel con sumption.
However, the problem here is that a cruise ship is rarely utilised on the same route over the ship’ s entire life-cycle. Moving to another route might require completely different speeds which would perhaps again lead to poor fuel economy.
Jukova Corporation
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