Tag: ship

Energy Efficiency of Ships, Deltamarin

Deltamarin Ltd, a Finnish maritime engineering and consulting firm has developed a simulation and analysis tool, that allows to study the energy efficiency of ships. The model takes into account not only the vessel speed and fuel consumption, but also the secondary on-board electricity consumers and waste heat recovery. Results are shown in a Sankey diagram like the one below.


The Sankey diagram in this pic doesn’t show any numbers or unit of flow, so we can only conclude from the arrow magnitudes that about 50% of the energy is lost as heat at the engine (some of which is recovered for heating of water).
I am not sure about the propulsion being electric though.

The design of the diagram is rather crude and diagonal lines are visibly pixelated. But nevertheless it seems like a good way to get the energy efficiency model result data across other than in a table.

Watch this video where a Deltamarin engineer explains the simulation model and also the Sankey diagram.

Ship Energy Use Sankey Diagram, DNVGL

The last Sankey diagram from the maritime sector I presented in this post receievd was shared a couple of times, so here is another one from the same topic area. Sorry, but this one is a little bit blurry even in the original document.

Taken from page 8 of the 2014 report ‘Next Generation Energy Management’ by DNVGL AS (authors George Dimopoulos, Nikolaos Kakalis).

Losses branch out as dark grey arrows. From the 100% energy in fuel only 28.9% are used as propulsive thrust, some other 5.6% as on-board electricity, heat or service steam.

Many more Sankey diagrams in the same report, check out figures 9, 12, 16 and 17.

Sankey Diagram for a Cruise Ship

I have presented several examples of Sankey diagrams in the field of maritime technology before (see here).

This recent article (Baldi, F., Ahlgren, F., Nguyen, T., Gabrielii, C., Andersson, K. (2015): Energy and exergy analysis of a cruise ship. In: Proceedings of ECOS 2015 – the 28th International Conference on Efficiency, Cost, Optimization, Simulation and Environmental Impact of Energy Systems) confirms that “the complexity of the energy system of a [cruise] ship where the energy required by propulsion is no longer the trivial main contributor to the whole energy use thus makes this kind of ship of particular interest for the analysis of how energy is converted from its original form to its final use on board.”

The authors conduct a thorough energy and exergy analysis for a cruise ship in the Baltic Sea. The ship has different operation modes (sea-going, manoeuvring, port stay). The energy analysis “allows identifying propulsion as the main energy user (41% of the total) followed by heat (34%) and electric power (25%) generation”. Nevertheless, “it can be seen that the energy demand for auxiliary power is comparable in size to that for propulsion.”

The data for this Sankey diagrams in the annex of the paper and shows that flows are in TJ for an operation period of 11 months. Blue, yellow and green arrows depict energy use, while the orange arrows reveal heat losses to the environment.

The study continues with an exergy analysis of the ship, since it reveals more on the system inefficiencies. The exergy analysis is shown as a Grassmann diagram in the paper. This is structured similarly to the Sankey diagram above, but has dark orange arrows representing the exergy destruction. This is mainly from the Diesel engines and the oil-fired boilers.

I recommend this paper not only to naval engineers, but to everyone who wishes to get a better understanding of exergy and Grassmann diagrams. Can we consider Grassman diagrams a subset of Sankey diagrams? What do you reckon?

Retrofit for a Maritime Vessel Engine

From what seems to be a 1998 abstract on retrofitting the main engine of the Japanese vessel Fukaemaru come these two Sankey diagrams. Found this on the website of the Kobe University Martime Faculty. Both nice plain black&white.

The first one shows energy efficiency of the original gas turbine equipped machine room. The base seems to be 100% energy (the label actually says ‘fuel exergy’) and the useful energy (arrow going straight up, labeled 出力) is 15.48% only. Losses branch out as arrows to the left and to the right.

The other Sankey diagram shows the energy flows for a diesel powered main engine. Efficiency is up to 37.38%

Read the full abstract here (in Japanese).

On a side note: funny to see that in the description of the figure at the bottom the author actually turned “Sankey Diagram” into a “Keysan Diagram”…

Ship engine efficiency visualized

Kongsberg Maritime has developed a ship engine room simulator that also features a Sankey diagram visualization.

The Sankey diagram is a simple bottom to top breakdown of the energy contained in the fuel input. Useful energy on the power train is shown as a vertical flow to the top, while losses branch out to the right. The display can be toggled between “MW” and percent.
This visualization is one of the “approach[es] Kongsberg Maritime has towards enabling the Green Ship”.

Hydrogen Generation Path Sankey Diagram

The below Sankey diagram is shown on a webpage of HAW University of Applied Sciences. It shows the generation path of hydrogen from natural gas, and the overall energy yield.

Unfortunately the diagram is too small to grasp the details. The Sankey arrows represent energy content. Losses are shown as black arrows. This seems to have been the result of a study project dealing with a fuel cell driven boat (ZEMSHIPS).

Efficiency Diagram for Ship Engines

MAN Diesel, a renown producer of marine and power plant diesel engines, has been working on improving fuel efficiency of its engines. Today, the fuel energy efficiency is about 50%. The MAN Turbo Efficiency System (TES) allows to recover of heat from the exhaust gas, which is responsible for about 50% of the energy losses.

Here is a Sankey diagram that shows the recovery of energy from exhaust gas.


Download a description of the TES here (PDF, 291 KB)
or view a high resolution version of the above Sankey diagram from their press picture gallery.

Energy Losses in Small Fish Trawler Operations

In a report on “Fuel and financial savings for operators of small fishing vessels” by J.D.K. Wilson from Maputo, Mozambique (available on the FAO website), the author explains that in a small slow-speed vessel, only approximately 35% of the energy created from the burning of fuel can actually be utilized to run the propeller, thus can be “spent on useful work such as pulling the net”.

I have “translated” the given values into a Sankey diagram, using the original image as a background layer. This works quite fine, apart from the very thin (1%) flow of friction losses.

On a side note: this is the first time I am presenting a right-to-left oriented Sankey diagram on this blog.

The author concludes, that energy can be saved on the engine and transmission, however the mode of operation (e.g. to reduce the effect of wave resistance), and hull maintenance also play a role. Read more interesting details.