Effects of a turbocharger cut out system on vibration characteristics of a propulsion shafting system and a large low speed marine diesel engine

To cope with the long term recession in the shipping industry due to oversupply of ships and high oil prices and due to reinforcement of environmental regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emission from ships, large container vessels built recently have ultra-long stroke engines with high propulsion efficiency. For these, de-rated engine and tuning technologies are used to reduce fuel oil consumption. However, previously built vessels were optimized for high ship speed. In these case, lowering ship speed to reduce ship operating cost does not provide similar benefits. Therefore, engine manufacturers have developed a turbocharger cut-out system to reduce fuel oil consumption at low speed. This has the advantage of reducing fuel consumption at low speeds, but also has the characteristic of producing higher torsional exciting force than is typical in existing engines for low load ranges. In this paper, the performance and dynamic characteristics of a marine diesel engine were reviewed after applying a turbocharger cut-out system. Then the effects on the engine body vibration and the torsional vibration were examined for a corresponding propulsion shafting system in a Panamax container-vessel equipped with a turbocharger cut-out system optimized for slow steaming. As a result, the torsional vibratory stress in shafts was increased. This had a larger effect on the X-mode shape of the engine body vibration and on the upper structure vibration, when one of three turbochargers was cut out.