Nov

Diesel engines are an essential part of ship propulsion systems. Failures of these engines lead to downtime of the ship, which may yield economic or safety issues, and the need for costly maintenance activities. Therefore, ship operators like Loodswezen, Fugro and the Royal Netherlands Navy are looking for suitable maintenance policies that prevent these failures to occur, and at the same time do not lead to over maintenance. As the ships are operated in a variable manner and in different operational environments, defining such a policy and the required maintenance intervals is not trivial.

In his PDEng project, Prabu Duplex designed a life prediction tool for diesel engine components, that enables to incorporate the typical variations in operating conditions in the service life assessment.