Rising fuel costs and tightening International Maritime Organization (IMO) regulations have sparked demand for more powerful ship energy systems that use less fuel.
To help meet this demand, ABB, Deltamarin, and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland partnered to build a ship energy flow simulator using MATLAB®, Simulink®, and Simscape™. The simulator enables engineers to test, evaluate, and implement novel technologies with fewer prototypes, as well as to design and retrofit optimized energy systems based on customer requirements and ship operating profiles.
“It is practically impossible to prototype a major energy subsystem for today’s vessels—it takes too long and is too expensive,” says Juha Orivuori, lead development engineer at ABB. “Simulink and Simscape enable us to simulate each individual subsystem as part of a complete ship energy system so that we know how it will work before we implement it.”