ONBOARD COMFORT PIVOTAL TO PROPELLER SERIES

Viewpoint

NICK EDSTROM | Editor nedstrom@motorship.com

Firing the gun

The dust has barely settled on the draft agreement of the EU’s FuelEU Maritime legislation, which has seen difficult issues surrounding the admissibility of carbon-based fuels, the range of renewable fuels of non biological origin (RFNBO), certification and the allocation of funding resolved.

The rules themselves are likely to achieve their primary objective of encouraging the early adoption of sustainable alternative marine fuels into the market, which is intended to support the development of the EU’s domestic alternative fuels infrastructure.

The introduction of the multiplier mechanism to drive early adoption demand for alternative fuels represents an elegant solution to the challenge of creating demand, which in turn incentivise the production and hence the availability of e-fuels.

Subsequently, the rules are expected to expect to foster the development of equivalent to 2% of fuel consumption by 2035, at which point the reduction targets for the greenhouse gas intensity of energy used on board by ships will be raised.

The maritime sector is being asked to play a major role in the introduction of alternative fuels into Europe’s supply chain, acting as some of the first stable sources of demand, which will give European fuel suppliers the certainty to develop supply.

The creation of stable reliable demand will then allow alternative fuel suppliers to overcome the myriad technical and economic challenges that introducing alternative fuel supplies will entail – and Say’s Law will then begin to apply as expanding supply begins to create its own demand. Or to put it another way, the chicken and the egg problem is skirted by funding a poultry farm.

For operators in Europe’s short-sea sector who do not have the appetite or means to invest in offtake agreements with green methanol suppliers, the shortage of commercially available methanol for bunkering remains a key constraint to investment decisions, as Pat Wheater hears in this month’s issue.

Wider issues around the emergence of low-cost sources of renewable e-fuel supply in the US incentivised by provisions of President Biden’s blockbusting Inflation Reduction Act mean that European subsidies to operators to expand alternative fuel consumption may end up funding the most competitive renewable fuel plants on the cost curve. In other words, the supply that may be created may be located in Texas or even in Oman and Saudi Arabia. Investments of close to USD30bn into export-oriented green ammonia plants in the latter two have been announced within the last two months.

Nor is the only area where US regulations are likely to have a wider impact on the market. We note that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) proposal has completed consultation on the introduction of OPS requirements for terminals serving the oil tanker segment between 2025 and 2027.

I hope that you find something to interest you in this month’s issue, which also looks ahead to upcoming discussions about the inclusion of carbon capture technology into CII rules, and includes a interesting article on a potential nanotechnology advance that will improve the efficiency of reduction in EGR units.

A new propeller design series tailored to the needs of cruise vessels is being developed under a Dutch-led joint industry project(JIP), writes David Tinsley.

Initiated by research body MARIN, the Wageningen FC research endeavour is the follow-up to the F-Series JIP, which realised a systematic range of 150 fixed-pitch propellers for merchant vessels using the latest technological tools. The R&D work showed that the geometric characteristics of propellers for cruise ships and other vessels such as large motor yachts, which impose especially high demands as to onboard comfort levels, differ from the requirements of the gamut of mercantile traders covered by the F-Series.

The objective of the collaboration partners in the Wageningen FC-series project is thereby to design and test 18 additional, fixed-pitch propellers to suit those applications where passenger comfort is of the highest order, married with exacting energy saving criteria. Only five- and six-bladed screws with a pitch ratio equal to, or higher than, 1.0 are being considered.

The F-series programme, which involved a multiplicity of companies and institutes, had followed successive JIPs realising the Wageningen CD-series open and ducted controllable pitch propellers, and Wageningen TT controllable and fixed pitch tunnel thruster propellers, including rim-driven units. The latest initiative underscores the fact that propeller design has become a continuous drive for refinement and advance, to achieve the best balance between propulsive efficiency, hull vibration levels, and onboard and radiated underwater noise levels.

The FC project is undertaken through recourse to multiobjective optimisation tools, in combination with both boundary element methods(BEM) and Reynolds-averaged NavierStokes(RANS) CFD techniques at the design stage.

All propeller models will be manufactured on a new, five-axis milling machine, and tested in open water conditions using the quasi-steady measurement technique, which was deployed for the earlier CD-series propellers. The dataset of the FCseries will be included in the software of the F-Series JIP as a subset, so as to enable comparison of results.

At its outset, the budget for the FC programme was estimated at EUR280,000($299,500), and it was envisaged that some EUR 190,000($200,500) would be covered by the study partners.

Tier III

Stage V