BATTERY-HYBRIDS & ELECTRIFICATION
WINGD RECEIVES 1ST ORDER FOR ELECTRIFICATION SOLUTION Swiss-based engine and marine propulsion designer WinGD has secured its first order for a battery-hybrid powerpack for deep-sea ships following a contract with Jinling Shipyard earlier this year. The contract will see the company’s system installed on four 7,000CEU PCTC vessels on order at China’s CSC Jinling Shipyard with deliveries due to start in 2023. In an exclusive interview in early July with The Motorship, WinGD’s hybridisation programme manager Stefan Goranov said the order “is a good sign that we are [moving] in the right direction”. A formal announcement about this first order with more details will be issued soon. The Motorship has followed WinGD’s development since September 2019, when we first reported that it was working on feasibility studies to quantify the benefits and the tradeoffs between a conventional and hybrid propulsion system for deep sea vessels. A transient-capable full-system simulations and modular Hybrid Control System, backed up by a seamless workflow across all the stages of development and deployment, sets WinGD’s development apart from other providers, Goranov believes. He indicated that the specifications for the energy management controller are continuously evolving, explaining that its approach to such projects is to prepare bespoke solutions, that are based on a customer’s specific requirements, rather than off-the-shelf options. These include such details as how the system shall behave in certain conditions and what information is to be displayed on board. Other ship operators are also taking an interest in WinGD’s system. “We are now working on a few feeder container ships with some customers,” Goranov said, without mentioning names. He is also looking at the potential for adding similar systems – but using super capacitors rather than batteries – for example on LNG carriers, which are traditionally equipped with shaft generators only. Main engine; main focus Offering hybrid systems may seem an unusual departure for a traditional engine designer, but Goranov sees that as an advantage. “We are a component-agnostic system integrator; the only piece of equipment we are designing in this whole system is the main engine.” By contrast, pure system integrators do not have any in-house engine expertise and access to the latest engine-related technologies which can be combined to further boost the overall ships’ efficiency, he said. Since WinGD began developing 8 Stefan Goranov, WinGD's hybridisation programme manager
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Credit: Gasum
The award of a first contract for a WinGD battery-hybrid powerpack represents a next step on the engine designer’s journey into system integration and electrification, Paul Gunton reports
this programme in 2018, “our approach is to put the main engine in the centre we then match the rest of the components, and we actively control everything as one coordinated whole, with the main engine in the equation”, Goranov said. For example, if the goal is to shave peaks – taking engine power to charge batteries when other demands are reduced – that must be plannedto take into account all the inefficiencies in a system. As well as the main engine, that is coupled to a shaft generator, two converter stages and the battery itself, which could amount to 10% total losses. So there is a risk that although peak-shaving might result in an engine running more efficiently, because of losses elsewhere that it has to overcome, fuel consumption of the ship as a whole could actually increase. To overcome this risk, WinGD has developed a hybrid control system that interfaces with the engine control system to allow peak-shaving “only when its optimisation functions show that, given all the constraints, we will be better off doing it,” he said. To illustrate these points when a ship is at the design stage, WinGD has built a full-system simulation suite, which it also believes sets it apart from other system integrators. “We use the same main engine models that we use for designing those engines,” Goranov said, “and when we model the rest of the systems around it, we can input any operational profile and can see what behaviour and the fuel consumption would be, and derive figures on what the corresponding CO2-equivalent emissions are anticipated.”
8 Bunker vessels, as well as smaller inland vessels, represent an interesting 4-stroke segment for WinGD's new electrification offering. Cruise vessels are an interesting market for electrification solutions, but "generally fit components from a single supplier", Goranov noted
Deepsea hybrid options The Motorship suggested to him that, for ships on deepsea voyages, their machinery operates in a steady state for much of the time and some might be surprised that there are enough opportunities to benefit from a peak-shaving battery hybrid set-up. That view is too simplistic, he suggested, as the peakshaving is not the only feature a hybrid system enables. He prefers to refer to ‘electrification’ rather than ‘hybrid’, since
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