Abstract
Diesel engines are widely used in marine transportation as a direct connection to the propeller and as electrical principal or auxiliary generator sets. The engine is the most critical piece of equipment on a vessel platform; therefore, the engine’s reliability is paramount in order to optimize safety, life cycle costs, and energy of the boat, and hence, vessel availability. In this paper, the improvements of a failure database used for a four-stroke high-speed marine diesel engine are discussed. This type of engine is normally used in military and civil vessels as the main engine of small patrols and yachts and as an auxiliary generator set (GENSET) for larger vessels. This database was assembled by considering “failure modes, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA),” as well as an analysis of the symptoms obtained in an engine failure simulator. The FMECA was performed following the methodology of reliability-centered maintenance (RCM), while the engine response against failures was obtained from a failure simulator based on a thermodynamic one-dimensional model created by the authors, which was adjusted and validated with experimental data. The novelty of this work is the methodology applied, which combines expert knowledge of the asset, the RCM methodology, and the failure simulation to obtain an accurate and reliable database for the prediction of failures, which serves as a key element of a diesel engine failure diagnosis system.
Highlights
The diesel engine is the most often used engine type in naval propulsion, as well as in electrical energy generation of the military vessels
The main conclusion of this work was that the proposed optimized failure database significantly improved the detection of engine failures
The conclusions are organized into two different areas: construction of the original failure database using reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) and optimization of the failure database using a diesel engine simulator
Summary
The diesel engine is the most often used engine type in naval propulsion, as well as in electrical energy generation of the military vessels. Diesel engines have a high density of power, very good efficiency, high reliability, and better response to load changes than other solutions, such as a gas turbine [1,2]. Propulsion and power generation are the most critical systems on the vessel platform. The optimization of its reliability has an important impact on vessel availability, safety, and life-cycle. The maintenance energy cost is estimated to be around 2% of the energy in the life cycle of a diesel engine. Apart from reliability, efficiency is important since fuel consumption is one of the largest operating costs in a vessel’s life cycle [3].
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
