Ship Fuel Consumption Reduction Through Variable-Speed Generation Under Coordinated Control and Management Systems

This work aims at showing how fuel consumption can be reduced through the combined action of dedicated control and management systems onboard a ship with DC distribution. At a lower level, the control system of the genset’s active rectifier minimizes the fuel consumption by changing the rotational speed in real time based on the requested power according to the genset’s fuel consumption map. At a higher level, an energy management system optimizes the power flows distribution among the genset, battery and loads to minimize the fuel consumption in a larger time horizon based on the same map. This result is obtained by exploiting the onboard battery to temporarily increase or decrease the power demand for the genset compared to the load request. The proposed approach is validated performing simulations based on experimental power profiles that were acquired onboard a real vessel.