Inland River Ships Research Articles

Air Pollutant Emission Factors of Inland River Ships under Compliance

Inland river ships (IRSs) use diesel with a lower sulfur content and emit relatively low emissions, making it challenging to monitor their emissions. Sniffer monitoring equipment was installed from August 2020 to June 2022 at the Gezhou Dam of the Yangtze River and monitored emissions from 8,238 IRSs passing through the lock. We partnered with the maritime department to select 100 ships passing through the lock to extract fuel oil samples for direct fuel sulfur content (FSC) detection, which determined the actual FSC of the passing ships. The monitoring data from these 100 ships indicated that the relative error of the SO2 emission factors (EFs) and FSC results is significant at the 10-parts-per-million level. The monitoring data from the remaining 8,138 ships showed that the EFs of NO, NO2, PM2.5, and PM10 were 24.02 ± 16.92 g kg−1, 10.30 ± 18.08 g kg−1, 0.72 ± 0.60 g kg−1, and 0.92 ± 0.70 g kg−1, respectively. The NOx EFs of container ships are higher than those of other ship types, while the PM EFs for different ship types do not significantly differ. Based on these EFs, we calculated the average emission rates for different types of ships passing through locks, which is a real-time measurement method for estimating ship emissions. In addition, a comparison of ship EF measurements over the past 20 years revealed that EF values for SO2, NOx, and PM exhibited a downward trend, with the calculated results of the current study determined to be the lowest numerical level.

Ship deployment problem with green technology adoption for an inland river carrier under non-identical streamflow and speed limits

The maritime industry is currently experiencing a shift towards green corridors. The inland waterway is the main transportation corridor with a relatively low adoption of green technologies, which produces heavy air pollution in inland cities. This paper investigates the ship deployment problem for an inland river carrier considering the adoption of green fuel and green technologies for a given ship fleet. A non-linear programming (NLP) model is proposed to jointly optimize green technology adoption, sailing speed, and routing problems while considering two unique characteristics of inland river shipping, including the non-identical streamflow and the speed limits on each shipping leg. The analytical propositions reveal the optimal operation strategy of the inland river ship fleet, and a column generation-based algorithm is further designed to solve the proposed model. By jointly investigating the ship operation strategy and sulphur emissions, we find the following management insights: Firstly, the ship would have a lower willingness to invest in shore power (scrubber) if it installed scrubber (shore power). The higher streamflow and looser speed limits would reduce the spillover effect of green technology adoption. Secondly, emissions will spillover from ports to river legs if only shore power is provided. Our findings provide valuable insights for policymakers to promote complete green technology adoption to achieve comprehensive abatement of the entire inland river.

Effect of fuel injection pressure on biodiesel blended combustion of Inland River diesel engine

Abstract Compared with ordinary diesel, biodiesel has greater viscosity, density, and flash point, especially under medium and low load, which is easy to cause poor atomization and inadequate combustion. In this paper, an in-line six-cylinder inland river ship diesel engine was used as a model to conduct simulation tests under 50% load of propulsion characteristics to explore the effects of different fuel injection pressures on oil-gas mixing, combustion, and emission of fuel blended with a small percentage of biodiesel. The results show that the increase of fuel injection pressure can enhance the average turbulence intensity in the cylinder as well as increase the relative flow velocity between oil and gas, which is beneficial to the mixture combustion. High fuel injection pressure will promote flame propagation, increasing the maximum burst pressure and the average temperature in the cylinder. Compared to the fuel injection pressure of 24 MPa, NOx emission increases by 5.5% and 15.6% respectively at 27 MPa and 30 MPa, and decreases by 10% and 25% respectively by SOOT.

Experimental Study on Ship Squat in Intermediate Channel

<div>The sinking and trimming of the hull in the channel would directly affect the handling and navigation safety of the ship. In view of the ship sinking, a series of empirical formulas to estimate the subsidence have been put forward for vessel in spacious shallow water areas. However, most of the equations are based on seagoing vessels. They are not suitable for inland ships with small scales, shallow drafts, and narrow navigation width. Till now, research on ship squat in intermediate channel has not yielded more practical results. Here, a generalized physical model is used to study the sinking of 500t class ships in restricted intermediate channel under different channel widths, water depths, and speeds. The main factors affecting the squat are analyzed, the empirical relation is compared with the measured squat. The <i>Barrass</i> equation is modified, and the calculation relation of the settlement suitable for inland river ships is proposed. The correlation coefficient <i>R</i><sup>2</sup> of the modified equation is 0.818, the standard error is 0.046, and the maximum error is 0.14 m, which can be used as a reference for inland waterway design research.</div>

Robust online learning based on siamese network for ship tracking

The complex and changeable inland river scenes resulting out of frequent occlusions of ships in the available tracking methods are not accurate enough to estimate the motion state of the target ship leading to object tracking drift or even loss. In view of this, an attempt is made to propose a robust online learning ship tracking algorithm based on the Siamese network and the region proposal network. Firstly, the algorithm combines the off-line Siamese network classification score and the online classifier score for discriminative learning, and establishes an occlusion determination mechanism according to the classification the fusion score. When the target is in the occlusion state, the target template is not updated, and the global search mechanism is activated to relocate the target, thereby avoiding object tracking drift. Secondly, an efficient adaptive online update strategy, UpdateNet, is introduced to improve the template degradation in the tracking process. Finally, on comparing the state-of-the-art tracking algorithms on the inland river ship datasets, the experimental results of the proposed algorithm show strong robustness in occlusion scenarios with an accuracy and success rate of 56.8% and 57.2% respectively. Supportive source codes for this research are publicly available at https://github.com/Libra-jing/SiamOL.

Risk Assessment and Application of Port Liquefied Natural Gas Trucks Bunkering Based on Hazard Identification and Computational Fluid Dynamics

In order to safely and orderly promote the application of LNG as a clean energy for inland river ships, the paper takes a port truck to bunker a 2000 tons LNG power bulk carrier for example, carrying out a qualitative risk assessment based on HAZID method, putting forward risk prevention and control measures, and using FLACS software to get CFD accident consequence quantitative calculation. The analysis shows that the overall risk is controllable under certain measures. It is the first time that this method has been applied to the risk assessment of Trucks Bunkering.

Recent advances and perspectives towards emission inventories of mobile sources: Compilation approaches, data acquisition methods, and case studies

In recent years, great efforts have been devoted to reducing emissions from mobile sources with the dramatic growth of motor vehicle and nonroad mobile source populations. Compilation of a mobile source emission inventory is conducive to the analysis of pollution emission characteristics and the formulation of emission reduction policies. This study summarizes the latest compilation approaches and data acquisition methods for mobile source emission inventories. For motor vehicles, a high-resolution emission inventory can be developed based on a bottom-up approach with a refined traffic flow model and real-world speed-coupled emission factors. The top-down approach has advantages when dealing with macroscale vehicle emission estimation without substantial traffic flow infrastructure. For nonroad mobile sources, nonroad machinery, inland river ships, locomotives, and civil aviation aircraft, a top-down approach based on fuel consumption or power is adopted. For ocean-going ships, a bottom-up approach based on automatic identification system (AIS) data is adopted. Three typical cases are studied, including emission reduction potential, a cost-benefit model, and marine shipping emission control. Outlooks and suggestions are given on future research directions for emission inventories for mobile sources: building localized emission models and factor databases, improving the dynamic updating capability of emission inventories, establishing a database of emission factors of unconventional pollutants and greenhouse gas from mobile sources, and establishing an urban high temporal-spatial resolution volatile organic compound (VOC) evaporation emission inventory.

Recognition and Depth Estimation of Ships Based on Binocular Stereo Vision

To improve the navigation safety of inland river ships and enrich the methods of environmental perception, this paper studies the recognition and depth estimation of inland river ships based on binocular stereo vision (BSV). In the stage of ship recognition, considering the computational pressure brought by the huge network parameters of the classic YOLOv4 model, the MobileNetV1 network was proposed as the feature extraction module of the YOLOv4 model. The results indicate that the mAP value of the MobileNetV1-YOLOv4 model reaches 89.25%, the weight size of the backbone network was only 47.6 M, which greatly reduced the amount of computation while ensuring the recognition accuracy. In the stage of depth estimation, this paper proposes a feature point detection and matching algorithm based on the ORB algorithm at sub-pixel level, that is, firstly, the FSRCNN algorithm was used to perform super-resolution reconstruction of the original image, to further increase the density of image feature points and detection accuracy, which was more conducive to the calculation of the image parallax value. The ships’ depth estimation results indicate that when the distance to the target is about 300 m, the depth estimation error is less than 3%, which meets the depth estimation needs of inland ships. The ship target recognition and depth estimation technology based on BSV proposed in this paper makes up for the shortcomings of the existing environmental perception methods, improves the navigation safety of ships to a certain extent, and greatly promotes the development of intelligent ships in the future.

Impact of AIS Data Thinning on Ship Air Pollutant Emissions Inventories

This article examines the impact of automatic identification system (AIS) data thinning on ship emissions inventory results. AIS data thinning is theoretically proven to lead to a smaller result for a ship’s air pollutant emissions inventory. The AIS dynamic data of six sampled ships for 1 day and for 1 year were thinned at 1 min, 3 min, 10 min, 30 min, and 1 h time intervals, and then CO2, NOX, CH, PM, SO2, and other air pollutant emissions were estimated both with and without AIS data thinning in the different time intervals. The results show that AIS data thinning affects the air pollutant emissions inventory results of the ships, and the impact is greater as the thinning interval increases. When the thinning interval is less than 10 min, the impact is less than 10%, but the impact increases to about 10–15% at a 30 min interval and about 15–20% at a 60 min interval. The impacts of thinning on the emissions of ships with acutely fluctuating speeds are more significant because the constantly changing speed is the main reason why data thinning affects the ship emissions inventory. Therefore, these data suggest that the AIS data can be thinned at intervals of 5 or 10 min when establishing a coastal or national ship air pollutant emissions inventory, the AIS data should be thinned at intervals of less than 3 min when establishing the air pollutant emissions inventory of inland river ships, and data thinning is not recommended when establishing a port or smaller-scale ship air pollutant emissions inventory.

Multi-Sensor-Based Hierarchical Detection and Tracking Method for Inland Waterway Ship Chimneys

In the field of automatic detection of ship exhaust behavior, a deep learning-based multi-sensor hierarchical detection method for tracking inland river ship chimneys is proposed to locate the ship exhaust behavior detection area quickly and accurately. Firstly, the primary detection uses a target detector based on a convolutional neural network to extract the shipping area in the visible image, and the secondary detection applies the Ostu binarization algorithm and image morphology operation, based on the infrared image and the primary detection results to obtain the chimney target by combining the location and area features; further, the improved DeepSORT algorithm is applied to achieve the ship chimney tracking. The results show that the multi-sensor-based hierarchical detection and tracking method can achieve real-time detection and tracking of ship chimneys, and can provide technical reference for the automatic detection of ship exhaust behavior.

A Real-Time Measurement-Modeling System for Ship Air Pollution Emission Factors

The lack of techniques for monitoring ship emissions all day and in all weather conditions to obtain real-time emission factor values is the main problem in understanding the characteristics of ship emissions, and there is still no perfect solution. In this study, a real-time measurement-modeling system was designed and implemented. The system was divided into three parts: (1) a portable exhaust monitoring device, which could be mounted on a drone, aircraft, patrol boat, dock, and bridge crane, as well as on the shore, to conduct all-weather and real-time online monitoring of ship emissions; (2) a monitoring information platform for ship emissions, based on a Spring + Spring MVC + MyBatis (SSM) framework and Vue front-end technology; and (3) a cloud server that received real-time ship emission measurement data and stored it after verification and analysis to calculate the pollutant gas and particulate matter emission factors. Following development, this system was used to monitor the emissions of ocean-going and inland river ships. Analysis of the acquired data showed that the system could effectively measure the emission factors of ship exhausts full-time in a variety of weather scenarios. This system can improve the efficiency of maritime law enforcement and provide technical support for promoting the construction of ship emission control areas. It can also help researchers obtain ship emission data, as well as an improved understanding of the emission characteristics of ships.

Scrubber installation and green fuel for inland river ships with non-identical streamflow

Recently, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and government sectors have enacted several stringent regulations to curb the emissions of ships. Green fuel and scrubber installation are two prevailing adaptation strategies used by ships to reduce emissions. Green fuel leads to a high shipping cost with the consumption of low-sulphur but highly-priced oil, while scrubber installation is a long-term decision, which incurs a high capital cost from the setting up of desulphurization facilities but ensures ships can continue consuming low-priced oil. This paper makes a theoretical and holistic investigation of the strategy choice of a container ship in an inland river by taking into account the impact of streamflow velocity. For the inland shipping service, the sailing speed of a ship is the sum of its engine speed and streamflow velocity. The engine speed determines the fuel consumption, and the sailing speed determines the round-trip time of a ship. We found that the engine speed of a ship increases with respect to the streamflow velocity under both strategies in the sense of cost minimization. Also, the streamflow velocity increases the incentive of a ship to install a scrubber. Finally, numerical experiments based on the Yangtze River are conducted to demonstrate our proposed models.

Strategic planning of inland river ports under different market structures: Coordinated vs. independent operating regime

This paper addresses the strategic planning issue of ports in an inland river corridor with location-dependent waterway depths, which determine the maximum navigable ship sizes deployed in ports. A vertical-structure model is proposed to capture the interrelationships among port operators, carriers, and shippers. The shippers, who are assumed to be continuously distributed along the inland river corridor, choose transshipment ports to minimize their own full transport cost from origin to destination. The carriers aim to maximize their own profit by determining waterway freight rates and ship fleet (in terms of ship size and number of ships). The port operators determine port capacity and port service charge to achieve their own objective, depending on the port market structures adopted, i.e., coordinated vs. independent regime. Under the coordinated regime, the central government aims to maximize total social welfare of the entire inland river system. Under the independent regime, each local government along the inland river corridor maximizes the local social welfare of individual port inside its jurisdiction. The properties of the models with different regimes are analytically explored. Our study develops a comprehensive model that can be used to analyze the investment and regulatory decisions for an inland river shipping corridor composed of multiple heterogeneous ports. The modelling results suggest that local governments have a tendency to overinvest port capacity beyond system optimum. Therefore, in the choice of regulatory regimes, one needs to balance the costs of regulation vs. the avoidance of excessive investments under central government intervention. Findings specific to the Yangtze River inland shipping corridor are also provided.

Feeder Scheduling and Container Transportation with the Factors of Draught and Bridge in the Yangtze River, China

Inland shipping in the Yangtze River in China has become very prosperous, making feeder scheduling and container transportation increasingly difficult for feeder operators. This research analyzed the decision-making of container transportation businesses in feeder companies operating between Shanghai Port and inland ports along the Yangtze River in China. The research considered the complexity of the natural conditions and water channels, including the draught limitations and the height of the bridges over the river. To analyze ways to increase the effectiveness of shipping containers from Shanghai Port into inland river ports along the Yangtze River, we built a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model to minimize the total operating cost and determine the most effective departure time of each feeder. After linearizing the model, we designed a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to increase solution efficiency and introduced a taboo list and aspiration criterion of a Taboo Search (TS) algorithm to improve the PSO algorithm. Finally, we verified the accuracy of the model and the efficiency of the algorithms using numerical experiments. The research provides theoretical guidance for feeder operators and inland river shipping companies.

Ship choice and shore-power service assessment for inland river container shipping networks

Ship emissions are essential sources of air pollution and have received extensive attention from both academia and industry in recent years. Provision of power supply to the berthed ships is often preferable to improve the air quality of port areas. This paper first proposes a network-based model to capture the choice behaviour of container ships on shore power (SP) in an inland river shipping system. Then the efficiency of SP is evaluated for all ports connected by the shipping network in the sense of environmental improvement. The systematic method can investigate the differential effects of the promotion policies, such as, the emission regulation and electricity subsidy, on different ports incorporating the choice behavior of ships. The method implementation and policy insights are carefully examined in the simulation example of the Yangtze River.

An Improved Ant System Algorithm for the Ship Lock Arrangement Problem

With the fast development of the inland waterway transport and the increasing of quantity ships, it is obviously exposed the deficiency of inland river ship locks navigation capacity. In order to improve the ship lock navigation capability, to ensure convenient, safe, stable and orderly navigation through the ship locks, this paper established the improved ant system algorithm for the ship lock arrangement, and implemented corresponding algorithm through further design. The calculation results show that the improved ant system algorithm is effective in application of the ship lock arrangement.

Study on the Influence of COIM model on the Water Environment of inland River ship pollution discharge

In order to calculate and analyze the ship sewage river water environment, the influence of internal selection of rivers into the lake taihu main Chengdong port as the research object, based on the speed of flow, ship, ship engine power data such as a ship sewage and oil wastewater is put forward and the calculation method of and on the basis of zero dimensional water quality model, using the method of simulation optimization control goal against the push model (COIM method), the water environmental carrying capacity and the associated model of ship emissions of pollutants. The maximum bearing capacity of the Chendong port water body to the ship is deduced by using the correlation model, and the method to improve the bearing capacity of the water body is proposed according to the COIM model. The results show that the number of ships can be accommodated in Chendong Port is more than three times that of the existing ships, and the organic oxygen consumption (COD), nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) in the ship sewage have no significant influence on the water environment of Chendong Port.

Analysis on carbon emission reduction path and expected effect of inland river ships in China

In order to systematically study the carbon emission reduction path suitable for China's inland river ships, this paper analyzes the actual situation of China's inland river ships ' operation scale, fleet structure, fuel consumption, etc., and combines the development of domestic and foreign carbon emission reduction technologies and the ship's own operating characteristics. Carbon emission reduction technology paths for China's inland river ships have been proposed in this paper, which includes different tonnage classes, different ship ages, and different types of river ships. Also, the expected application effects of each technology path are analyzed in depth in this paper. The research results can give a certain support for the implementation of carbon emission reduction in China's shipping industry.

The Best-Worst Ant System for the Lock Chamber Arrangement Problem

There are many rivers in china, and the inland navigation resources are abundant. With the fast development of the inland waterway transport and the increasing of quantity ships, it is obviously exposed the deficiency of inland river ship locks navigation capacity. In order to improve the ship lock navigation capability, to ensure safe, convenient, stable and orderly navigation through the ship locks, this paper used a best-worst ant system to solve the lock chamber arrangement optimization problem, established the best-worst ant system for the lock chamber arrangement, implemented corresponding algorithm through further design, and tested the validity of it through the Yangtze Gorges lock chamber arrangement and the Qingyuan Water Conservancy lock chamber arrangement. The calculation results show that the best-worst ant system is effective in application of the lock chamber arrangement.

Research on Ship Exhaust Gas Accounting in Yangtze River

Based on the comparison and analysis of existing ship exhaust emission accounting methods, and combined with the characteristics of ship exhaust emissions in the Yangtze River channel, this paper selects the appropriate calculation idea, and revises the basic accounting method of ship exhaust emissions according to the calculation accuracy requirements in this paper. Finally, a calculation model for the emissions of ships in the Yangtze River channel is established, and its reliability and accuracy have been confirmed by model tests of the model data. In this paper, the Yangtze River ships are divided into sea-going ships and inland river ships, and their corresponding parameters are calculated respectively, in order to make sure that the accounting results have higher accuracy. The model has strong applicability to the exhaust emission of ships in the Yangtze River, and its calculation results are relatively accurate, and the calculation process is simple and efficient. This paper has a very high social significance and practical value for the analysis and model optimization study of the Yangtze River’s exhaust emission accounting.