Wind assisted ship propulsion: Exploring technologies, wing sail assessment procedure and VLGC case study

Abstract

A literature review of Wind Assisted Ship Propulsion methods is presented, along with an assessment procedure for wing sails and its thorough application in a case study. The assessment procedure conducted utilizes XFOIL to obtain a lift coefficient and drag coefficient, MARIN’s Blue Route application is used for obtaining wind data, finally MATLAB is utilized for calculations. The assessment procedure calculations focus on power, energy, fuel tonnage required, fuel tonnage saved, fuel volume required, and finical analysis including money saved, Net Present Value, and Simple Payback Period. These calculations are completed for a variety of fuels including combustion of High Sulphur Fuel Oil, Very Low Sulphur Fuel Oil, Liquified Natural Gas, Liquid Hydrogen, and Liquid Ammonia. In addition, the use of fuel cells is considered for Liquid Hydrogen, and Liquid Ammonia. The assessment procedure is deemed successful, the percent savings from the sail array mirrors that from literature very closely. The fuel savings results show 19% at 10 knots, 8% at 16 knots and 2% at 20 knots for the round trip from Hamburg, Germany to Walvis Bay, Namibia. During the literature review wing sails showed an average fuel oil consumption savings of 10%. More specifically up to 22% savings were observed at low speeds. On a more comparable journey from Cape Lopez, Gabon to Point Tucker Canada fuel oil consumption was reduced to 8.8% which is in line with 8.0% estimated during the case study on the round trip from Hamburg to Walvis Bay.