Investigation in Damages of Turbochargers for Marine Application

-Analysis of Database for Ship Reliability in Japan-

Abstract

Turbochanger is one of the most important auxiliary machines for the marine diesel engine and the reliable turbocharger is indispensable to improve the reliability of the diesel engine. The Ship Reliability Investigation Committee has created a data base system that has many failure data of the machines and equipments on Japanese ships with an MO classification. This paper reports the investigation results of the failure data of the turbocharger in the database.
The numbers of the ships registered in the database is 184, Each 187 and 53 failure of the turbochargers has been registered for the main engines and for the auxiliary engines. Typical failure mode is a crack due to corrosion. The failure rate of the turbocharger is less than 1% of the yearly total failures of the whole machines and equipments but average man-hour required for the maintenance work for the turbocharger is relatively high comparing to other machines and equipments.