May 30, 2016

How to improve the energy efficiency of your existing fleet?

Are you struggling with high operating costs or looking for ways to improve the environmental friendliness of your fleet? Let Deltamarin experts help you. Along with designing many of the world’s most energy-efficient vessels, we specialise in improving operating performance of sailing vessels.

With over 10 years of experience, Deltamarin is a pioneer in providing Energy Efficiency Courses for ship operators and their crews. Deltamarin has also conducted Energy Efficiency Audits on several vessels. A comprehensive ship assessment helps in recognising improvement potential on board by evaluating the entire ship or fleet, including ship systems and operational issues.

With the help of Deltamarin you will get

Energy Efficiency Courses

The Energy Efficiency Courses are based on Deltamarin’s know-how of saving energy, which covers a wide range of disciplines and technologies. Our goal has been to gain a profound understanding of operators’ real needs by listening carefully to them. The topics dealt with in Deltamarin courses are all covered in the recently published IMO model course 4.05, ‘Energy-Efficient Operation of Ships’.

Our courses provide the participants not only with necessary theoretical background on the topics, but also with tools for concrete fuel savings that they can implement in their work on board the ship. In addition to the specific topics, the participants gain general awareness of energy efficiency in production and consumption.

Furthermore, the course always includes discussions and workshops where the participants are able to share their experience. This is an important motivator for them in terms of getting support and starting to actively develop their own solutions, as well as finding new ways of saving in their daily work after the course.

The core of the concept is that everything starts from analysing ship energy flows. Any improvements are suggested in the order of their improvement potential, starting from high-level machinery concepts to specific consumer levels. The courses are therefore suitable for supporting ship operators in energy management planning at fleet level, as well as for crews working with specific systems.

Deltamarin has already collated a long list of references over the years. In total more than 60 courses have so far been arranged. The total number of training days is about 200,000. The feedback from the course participants has always been excellent with an average satisfaction score of 8.8 on a scale from 0 to 10.

Energy Efficiency Audits

The Energy Efficiency Audit gives a superb understanding of energy (electrical, heat and water) flows inside a vessel, and provides you with ideas and concrete proposals for how to save energy. On the hydrodynamics side, we have in some cases suggested adding duck tails and conducting ship studies to modify the bulb according to changing operating speeds or areas.

The audits help the operator to reduce fuel consumption and costs and to protect the environment. The result of all this is a roadmap for improvements with estimated investment costs and payback periods.

As an example, an audit on a passenger ship resulted in more than 40% fuel saving potential, of which almost one-third consisted of only operating improvements related mainly to the itineraries. Another audit revealed a potential for improving engine waste heat recovery, about 30% of which led to a spin-off study of the respective systems.

Deltamarin has so far conducted energy efficiency audits and evaluated systems and operating issues on about 30 vessels for more than 10 ship owners. In all cases, considerable fuel saving potential has been recognised with only a small investment.

Full package

The Energy Efficiency Course benefits can be taken to an even deeper level, if combined with an Energy Efficiency Audit on board prior to the course. That allows a thorough understanding of the ship’s or fleet’s energy efficiency. This hands-on approach to ship- or fleet-specific issues gives a head start for realising possible improvements and optimising the whole system in order for them to be able to operate truly efficiently.

Concrete examples from audits or other system studies motivate the course audience, since crews play a big part in monitoring and ensuring operating efficiency, irrespective of the automation level of the ship.

Deltamarin energy efficiency courses