Abstract
Hybridisation of energy sources in marine vessels has been recognized as one of the feasible solutions to improve fuel economy and achieve global emission reduction targets in the maritime sector. However, the overall performance of a hybrid vessel system is strongly dependent on the efficiency of the energy management system (EMS) that regulates the power-flow amongst the propulsion sources and the energy storage system (ESS). This study develops a simple but production-feasible and efficient EMS for a dynamic positioning (DP) hybrid electric marine vessel (HEMV) and real-time experimental evaluation within a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation environment. To support the development and evaluation, map-based performance models of HEMVs’ key components are developed. Control logics that underpin the EMS are then designed and verified. Real-time performance evaluation to assess the performance and applicability of the proposed EMS is conducted, showing the improvement over those of the conventional control strategies. The comparison using key performance indicators (KPIs) demonstrates that the proposed EMS could achieve up to 4.8% fuel saving per voyage, while the overall system performance remains unchanged as compared to that of the conventional vessel.
Highlights
In the maritime transport sector, ships are identified as the most efficient transport means for heavy freight and cargo transportation
Thereby, the results can be used to assess the potential improvement of energy cost, fuel consumption, and the emissions of the typical marine system
The whole simulation platform is placed in a temperature controllable thermal chamber where the temperature is held constant at 25 ◦C to maintain the stability of the electronic systems during the test
Summary
In the maritime transport sector, ships are identified as the most efficient transport means for heavy freight and cargo transportation. The hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation technique, which has been intensively used in many fields such as control development and verification, product and component assessment, and system performance validation [19,20,21,22], seems to be the most favourable method for real-time testing and evaluating the system It enables the testing of actual components in conjunction with a virtual computer-based simulation model to represent parts of the system. The method provides the ability to apply HIL techniques in constructing a real-time HEMV system and to transfer the advantages of HIL technology, which are very well documented and researched within the automotive and Electronics 2021, 10, 1280 aerospace domains, to the marine sector for real-time validation, evaluation, and verification It can be the premise for the development, verification, and deployment of the generation of hybridization and electrification of marine vessels.
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