Investigation on a Novel Seawater Exhaust Gas Cleaning System Applied for SO<sub>x</sub> Emissions Reduction of Marine Diesel Engine

Abstract

The control and regulation of SOx emissions have become a global urgent problem for the environment protection. In the field of ocean and marine engineering, The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has formally passed the amendment of MARPOL 73/78 Annex VI in 2008 that clarified the deadline of requirements on SOx emissions limit. A limitation of 3.5 %mm is strictly requested during 2012 to 2020. Hence the SOx emissions of marine diesel engines faces unprecedented challenges while effective control and regulation systems on the SOx emissions reduction are scarce in the existing ships. To meet the IMO's requirements, this paper has presented a novel seawater exhaust gas cleaning (EGC) system for the SOx emissions reduction of marine diesel engines. The post-combustion desulfurization technology was employed in the EGC system. The carbon ion and hydrogen ion contained in the seawater have been introduced into the EGC system to participant the reaction of desulfurization. The seawater EGC system has already been established in a real ship. Experiments have been carried out with the established seawater EGC system to comparatively analyze SOX emissions characteristics when burning different oil types, including heavy oil and light oil. The experiment results show that the newly established seawater EGC system can achieve satisfactory performance with a desulfurization efficiency of 88%. More important, the standard of the SOX emission limitation set by IMO has been met by using the proposed EGC system.