Impact of fouling on vessel energy efficiency

Shipbuilding and shipping areas are highly technically dependent to each other since shipping is the end user of shipbuilding industry that are suppliers of them. We can call these two as maritime business as a whole. One of the biggest specific challenge of maritime arrived as regulations about emission has begun to spread all over the world. Approximately 90% of the cargo carried in world trade is based on waterborne transport, and the volume of international waterborne trade is rapidly increasing day by day. Taking into account the pollutant (emission) values carried by the vessels, cargo and the distance, it is the cleanest way to transport by sea, compared to land and air transport. However, the emission values per vessel are quite high. Generally, NOx, SOx, CO2 and other pollutants are emitted in the exhaust gases from vessels driven by diesel engines. These pollutants have an adverse impact on the environment due to acid rain, thinning of the ozone layer and health problems. For example, the annual emission value of the world's 15 largest container ships is equal to the emission value of all cars on the world, approximately 760 million cars. Maritime industry has enormous potential in terms of decline in energy usage and emission supervision with respect to existing ships especially. The specific challenges are to introduce energy efficiency and minimize emissions; to make research on alternative energy sources; to conduct vessel electrification, where sailing displacements and infrastructures permit it; and to optimize the basic performance of vessels. Two of these challenges will be addressed in this work via one design and one operational improvement methods. These are vessel electrification in other words ship electric propulsion design and the other one is impact of fouling or opposite hull cleaning which enables efficiency and increase the performance of vessel. In this study, a battery hybrid electric ship automation data are analyzed using Curve Fitting and Detrended Fluctuation Analysis in order to interpret the impact of fouling on ship energy performance degradation and efficiency by continuous monitoring.