Identification of Vibration for Balancing in Fehn Pollux Ship with ECO Flettner Rotor

Flettner rotors are wind propulsion systems using the Magnus effect to generate thrust, thereby reduce fuel consumption and carbon emissions in the ships. However, rotor unbalance can cause excessive vibrations and energy loss, affecting the performance and stability of the system. There is a need to have a system onboard, which can predict the vibrations. The paper proposes a deep learning approach to predict the vibrations and unbalanced forces of a Flettner rotor based on the data of ECO Flettner rotor onboard the vessel MV Fehn pollux. The paper develops two methods to estimate the direction and magnitude of the unbalanced forces using the reading values of the strain gauges. The work also compares two recurrent neural network models, namely Long-short term memory and Gated Recurrent Unit, for vibration prediction and evaluates their performance using Mean Absolute Error and Root Mean Squared Error metrics. The results show that Long-short term memory model outperforms Gated Recurrent Unit model in prediction accuracy and can be implemented on the system onboard to monitor and prevent rotor unbalance. The paper also suggests some possible solutions for automatic self-balancing of the rotor and identifies some areas for future work.