Calculation of the Sankey diagram for ship propulsion plants using online simulators

Abstract

In recent years, the shipbuilding industry has been incorporating different technological innovations that adapt innovative techniques such as image correlation for 3D reconstruction, reduced order modeling methods for digital twins, pixel amplification techniques to measure vibrations, among other methodologies. The advancement of these methodologies help to obtain visual resources that allow a better understanding of a given phenomenon, which complements the results found numerically, analytically or experimentally. The present study collects data from different configurations of ship propulsion plants, which are based on real operating conditions. The operating conditions are given for fishing vessels; the "navigation" condition is selected as being the most frequent and the "fishing operation" as being the most energetically critical. These conditions are attached to the choice of the ship's propeller. For the propeller, the diameter, the number of blades and the length of the drive shaft from the main engine position to the propeller are considered. Three engine power levels (low, medium and high) are selected, represented by 300, 850 and 1300 HP engines. The aforementioned operating conditions are used to calculate the efficiency of the propulsion plant, obtaining several combinations. Furthermore, these configurations are expressed by means of Sankey diagrams and illustrations of the plant configurations in 3D using WebGL and Threejs libraries. Complementarily, these data are observed in an online simulator called "ShipSim", using "html" coding.