IIT Roorkee developing battery-operated short endurance marine ship

IIT Roorkee is developing a battery-operated short endurance marine ship which, if successful, could be an alternative to small vessels powered by the traditional diesel engine. The institute’s Hydropower Simulation Laboratory (HSL) has received financial support from the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways, and the Indian Maritime University, Visakhapatnam, for the project, said Thanga Raj Chelliah, Faculty-in-Charge, HSL.

There is a growing need for Short Endurance Marine Vessels (SEMV) like mooring launches, pilot launches, fishing vessels and tugboats. The life of a generic diesel-engine driven SEMV is about 17-20 years, and requires regular maintenance with expensive operational costs, and releases harmful emissions.

HSL, a research group in the Water Resources Development & Management Department at IIT Roorkee, has completed a project on the application of variable speed generation technology for tugboats and has developed a laboratory emulation set-up and tested two distinct fuel-saving methods.

The first one is a simple optimisation technique to schedule the tugboat’s diesel generators and batteries to meet its load demand to minimise fuel consumption. It achieved fuel savings of 29.86 per cent compared with a diesel-mechanical propelled system, and 2.9 per cent in comparison with fixed speed diesel-electric systems.

The second method is a coordinated control strategy based on a state machine control algorithm for a real-time tugboat operational cycle that operates a variable speed diesel-electric generator at a minimum specific fuel consumption and batteries’ state of charge. The fuel savings achieved by this method is 26.42 per cent, he said.

HSL started by researching the design of a battery-operated harbour vessel from scratch. Various lithium-ion battery technologies are available in the market with different specifications, said Vidyasagar Tummakuri, Research Scholar, HSL.

Japanese firm Toshiba has developed Lithium Titanium Oxide (LTO) under the commercial name Super Charge ion Battery, which won approval from the international ship classification society Nippon Kaiji Kyokai. This is the most suitable for marine propulsion applications based on its robustness, long life and ultra-fast six-minute charging time.

This LTO battery is considered to size the battery-operated marine electric powertrain with parametric analysis-based design space optimisation of hull form, with the objective of achieving maximum vessel speed and operating time, with minimum propulsion power requirement for a specified vessel weight. Importing the battery from Japan is a big issue, he said.

The low-powered laboratory hardware set-up can be linearly scaled up to harbour vessels, ranging from mooring launch (30kW) to tugboat (2MW), he said.

Currently, HSL is working towards storing sensor output data to a cloud server and preparing vessel operational data analytics. With these analytics, the vessel’s energy consumption can be optimised over a while, leading to increased operating times, he said.

(This reporter was recently at IIT Roorkee at the invitation of the institute.)

COMMENT NOW