Technical University of Madrid
  Naval Architecture Department - Model Basin Research Group -

• Index
• - Project Description -
• Partners
• Meetings
• Restricted Area
• Project Management
• Dissemination
• Links
• Gallery
• Contact

Project Summary

Many old fleets are currently operating without updating the propulsion design to new working conditions. Therefore, propulsion efficiency decays as time elapses inducing the rising of fuel consumption, contaminant gas pollution, engine maintenance costs and vibrations while ship capabilities decrease.
Fishing boats and tug boats fleets are the largest fleets of boats operating all over the world. From the smaller boats sailing near the coast to large trawler vessels, there is a wide range of fishing vessels crossing the seas.
An average of the operating life in these kinds of vessels can be estimated around 25 years. Since they use to work in two different conditions (fishing and searching the sea for schools), the design of the propulsion is conditioned by such different working conditions and with time, propulsion becomes less and less efficient.
By an appropriate economic knowledge of the actual situation of such fleets, it is desirable to estimate the cost reduction in fuel consumption and maintenance as well as gas emissions and vibration phenomena.
Economic tools together with engineering tools will be developed for the systematic updating of the propulsive (propeller and stern area) system to the new optimum working point in order to reach the main aim of the proposal. A standard methodology for this updating procedure will be the main outcome of the project.

Project Objectives

The project is focussed in obtaining the optimum method for updating old ship propellers from technological and economic points of view, in order to improve the fuel consumption rates and reduce the maintenance costs.
The objectives of SUPERPROP are :

• Most fixed pitch propellers installed on ships are Marin B-series. Results from methods for recovering shaft speed to the whole B-series calculated using CFD codes and model tests will be obtained, as well as cavitation predictions.
• Development of an economic strategy to predict the profitability of propulsion updating in old fleets.
• Improvement of the knowledge about the state of the art in old ships propulsion and their ageing.
• Thrust the knowledge in correlation methods to extrapolate results obtained from model testing to full scale.
• To apply CFD codes to predict propeller behaviour, to collate computational and model testing results and to estimate prediction accuracy of both methods.

The main innovative features of SUPERPROP are :

• To study economic profitability of old fleets and the saving that could be reached in fuel consumption, machining maintaining and contaminant gases emission.
• To use extensively full scale measurement for improving propulsion efficiency.
• Development of a strategy to reuse old propellers with low cost by means of machining or deforming to readjust it to new working conditions.

Scientific and Technological Prospects :

SUPERPROP addresses important research aspects in the areas of economic impact of ageing effect in old ships, marine propeller design, CFD modelling of propeller flow and scaling of propeller model test performance data to full-scale predictions. All these research achievements will be transferred into design tools, procedures and databases that can directly be applied in practical propeller design. The propeller types of interest in this project are conventional fix pitch propeller, which are the ones installed in the targeted fleet.

Model Basin Research Group (CEHINAV) - Naval Architecture Department (ETSIN)
Technical University of Madrid (UPM)
Arco de la Victoria s/n. - 28040 Madrid - Spain
Tel : +34913367156 Fax : +34915442149