Wind-Assisted Ship Propulsion

Background

For some years now there has been a resurgence of research on windassisted propulsion for ships. This is not the first time. Ever since the diesel engine and propeller have dominated ship propulsion, there has been research on wind propulsion, notably at the time of the oil crisis in the 1980s. Then it did not lead to a major uptake of wind propulsion.

Now again various research and development projects are underway, such as the WASP Ecoliner (Figure 1). There are several wind-assisted ships, such as the E-Ship and Estraden (Figure 2) and retrofits have been announced of vessels, such as Viking Grace, Fehn Pollux and a Maersk Tanker. Research is now continuing even though oil prices are low. 
Also the regulatory framework is increasing pressure to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A combination of new regulations and higher oil price provide an incentive for the adoption of wind propulsion in shipping, offering potentially large savings on emissions, fuel and cost. Still the uptake is slow.

Objectives

The proposed objective for the JIP is to overcome barriers to the uptake of wind-assisted propulsion, and specifically to:

• Improve methods for transparent performance prediction
• Use the improved methods to provide ship owners/operators with fast low-cost predictions for their fleet
• Review the regulatory perspective including status of rules and regulations, identify gaps and make recommendations, and provide examples on establishing compliance

The aim is to cover the majority of all marketed wind-assisted ship propulsors in this pre-competitive project. The project will not get into details of company-specific design solutions.

Potential project partners

Several groups of stakeholders could be identified for this project, including:

• General vendor market, such as providers/developers of wind propulsion systems who would benefit from verifiable and transparent fuel savings predictions. Wind propulsion system providers/developers would be expected to contribute data on their systems because creating sufficient transparency of performance quantification is a general project objective. However, some information may need to remain confidential because of the precompetitive nature of the project.
• Maritime authorities would benefit from better understanding of the link between fuel and CO2 saving technologies, and the regulatory framework
• Independent verifiers could benefit by improving their own methods
• Ship owners/operators would benefit from transparent and verifiable information on wind propulsion for their fleet.