Keep your cost of ownership on course for profitable operation

Today’s ships consume a lot of fuel. For a large cruise or container ship travelling between 20 to 24 knots, for example, consumption can average around 150 to 250 tons per day. It’s therefore not surprising that fuel accounts for a significant proportion of the running costs of a ship, varying between 40 to 60 percent depending on the type of vessel. With the cost of bunker fuel currently around $552 per ton, a ship’s fuel bill can easily run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

To maintain profitability, ship operators need to ensure their vessels’ engines are running at optimum efficiency. This is measured via a value known as Specific Fuel Oil Consumption (SFOC), which is the mass of fuel consumed per unit of time to produce each kilowatt of power.

To achieve the measurements needed to calculate a vessel’s SFOC, ABB offers two key measurement solutions. The first is Torductor Marine, a contactless device used to measure a ship’s propulsion power.

The key component of Torductor Marine is its sensor. A truly contactless device that requires only 25 cm of free shaft length to operate, the sensor is based on a magnetic operating principle, which eliminates the need to bind electronic devices to the propeller shaft. The latest version provides these benefits but in an even more compact package, making it even easier to install.