The continuous rise of the prices of petroleum in the last years, has increased the fuel bill on operating costs and it has forced many shipbuilders to reconsider the ship operation because units that were formerly profitable are not so any more.
VICUSdt is able to conduct energy auditing on ships. The main aim of the energy audit is to analyze how the energy is generated, transformed and used aboard. Once that is known, power saving propolsals can be drawn up.
First of all, the physical magnitudes to be controlled must be identified and then measurement sensors must be installed in order to register them. All this information will be recorded for its later analysis and thus to draw up concrete intervention proposals according to the type of boat and its operative profile. Reaching the main objective which is improving ship’s energy and profit. The improvements allowing an increase in the power efficiency of a certain ship, might not be applicable to another one, and so therefore there is no single path to follow and each ship needs a customized study.
For example, the profit obtained changing the propeller design which would call for the manufacturing of a new propeller in a fishing ship could be analyzed as follows:
- Annual fuel cost:
- Currently propeller efficiency:
- Newly designed propeller efficiency:
- Propulsive efficiency improvement:
- Cost of hull and propeller design analysis:
- Cost of propeller manufacturing and installation:
- Total cost of change:
- Savings made by power efficiency improvement:
- Depreciation period:
This demonstrates that an improvement of small apparent efficiency that could seem very expensive initially, it has a short depreciation period, compared to the life of a ship, reducing the ship’s running cost considerably.
(*) The propulsive efficiency does not only depend on the propeller efficiency. This is a simplification that has been made for this example.
