An Experimental Investigation into the Feasibility of a DC Hybrid Power Plant for a Northern Sea Route Ship

Increasingly, the melting of Arctic ice due to global warming has provided opportunities for commercial shipping between Asia and Europe. Given the vulnerability of the Arctic environment, especially due to emissions of short-lived pollutants from shipping activities, a more effective propulsion system with a comprehensive control strategy is required to reduce fuel consumption, thus potentially mitigating the impacts of shipping activities on the northern sea route (NSR). In this paper, a shipboard DC hybrid system powered by a combination of diesel generator sets and batteries is proposed and analysed in terms of its application on a ship in the NSR. The specific fuel consumption and various losses in the power sources were analysed to develop an efficiency-optimisation control strategy for the proposed DC hybrid power system. To evaluate the performance of the hybrid power system with the proposed optimisation control strategy, lab-scale experiments have been conducted in the Shanghai Marine Diesel Engine Research Institute to compare the proposed system with a conventional hybrid system. The experimental results indicate that the proposed DC hybrid power plant with the energy optimisation control contributes a 5.35% fuel saving compared with the DC fixed-speed diesel electric configuration during a scaled-down NSR scenario.