Condition monitoring in the marine/shipping industry

Pressures on running costs and emissions in the marine sector is getting ever tougher. Unplanned downtime can be very expensive particularly if it results in delays to schedules, missed delivery dates, missed loading or unloading slots, or demurrage charges.

Increasing use of electrical power, and at increasing voltages, puts more focus on electrically driven equipment. Items of particular interest to monitoring include:

• Electrical Generators – which may be up to 5 per ship
• Thrusters
• Air compressors
• Shaft Motors and Shaft Generators – these are a means of providing extra power to the main propeller shafts, which are driven by diesel but have additional electric motors that can assist, a bit like DFIG generators on wind turbines
• Refrigeration systems.

Because Faraday Predictive systems are installed in the electrical switchgear, not out on the equipment itself, they avoid some traditional challenges of fixed condition monitoring, including:

• Inaccessible equipment – like in-tank cargo pumps, thrusters, podded motors.
• ATEX issues – these are not a problem for Faraday Predictive systems, since the installation is all carried out in the switchroom, which is always a clean, dry, safe area.
• Cabling installation costs – often the cost of running cables from sensors on plant back to a central location for monitoring can be more expensive than the sensor system itself. Because the Faraday units are installed in the switchroom, cabling runs from sensor to the processor are very short (normally just within the cabinet itself). Communication from the processing unit to the rest of the world is done by ethernet, and many switchrooms already have ethernet network cabling installed already, again keeping the required new cable runs very short.

Case studies in Marine industry

Sea Water pump – early fault detection leading to 90% cost saving in the marine industry – case study