The Crazy Amount of Power Needed to Move World Largest Container Ships
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Welcome back to the our channel for details on the crazy engineering behind the massive engines powering modern container ships today. I am a naval architect with more than 20 years experience in the industry, including more than a decade spent in a research lab and also in the design department of a major shipyard. Good visuals and generally enjoyable video but you need to do some fact-checking and get you information right, I have a some corrections: wind turbine propulsion - the picture shown was of a sail-assisted propulsion system. A system that does work under many environmental conditions but is NOT a wind turbine - although they are in common use on maritime drones and pleasure craft to recharge batteries for electric propulsion systems. Second: HFO, heavy fuel oil, is NOT the same as diesel fuel, which in its variants is commonly referred to as MGO (Marine Gasoil) or MDO (Marine Diesel Oil). There are a lot of international restrictions on the use of HFO and it should not be confused with diesel fuel, which has a different set of restrictions and requirements. Third: the type of fuel has nothing to do with radiated noise. For airborne noise, the main engine, regardless of fuel type, is the primary source of air- and structure-borne noise. Underwater radiated noise is virtually always caused by the propeller. Period. Fourth: the first large LNG powered commercial ships anywhere were CONTAINER SHIPS built by NASSCO shipyard in the San Diego for TOTE, an American shipping company, not ships built years later for CMA CGM. While U.S. shipping companies and shipyards do not own or build the most ships in the world, they led the way and continue to move toward greener fuels. Fifth: the any diesel engine (and many gasoline engines) can run on LNG with some modifications. The engines you discuss here are modified diesel engines - the diesel cycle uses pressure to cause combustion of the fuel - and the primary modifications are to the fuel system. From a design standpoint, converting a diesel engine to operate on LNG de-rates the output power about 10% compared to the same engine running on diesel fuel. The engine cylinder pressures when using LNG are NOT an issue.
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