Failure Investigations of Ship Propulsion Plants

Abstract

It is an important and essential fact to ensure the safety of ships during their service on the sea, as well as the improvement of their perfomances. Therefore, it has been concentrated the efforts to secure the reliable ship operation in the field of ship manufacturing industries as same as of ship operators.
Although it has been customary to employ the duplication of machinery elements installed in ships as a temporizing way for the above purpose so far, an idea of reliability makes its appearance as a new device that yields a lot of profits. Reliability is the probability of success for a given period of time. In other words, a practical form of reliability is a sort of relationship between failure and time.
In this paper, a statistical investigation study of field data of fifty seven vessels proves that the failure ratc characteristics of a marine propulsion plant are considered to depend upon many factors, such as a kind of main engine installed in a vessel (diesel engine, steam turbine engine and so forth), a type of engine (B & W, M. A. N., UEC and so forth), an engine manufacturing factory, the date manufactured, and a kind of ships (cargo liner, tanker, ore carrier and so forth). Also this paper shows each quantitative failure effect of machinery components on the main engine plant performances as it might be applied to future marine propulsion plants installed on board.