Simulation of Marine Diesel Engine Propulsion System Dynamics During Extreme Maneuvering

The dynamic behavior of a typical four-stroke, medium-speed, marine diesel engine driving a Controllable Pitch Propeller (CPP) is investigated during ship maneuvering including fast propeller pitch changes. A modular model has been developed in Simulink/Matlab for the simulation of the dynamics of ship propulsion. The developed model considers the ship propulsion system as a set of three main modules: the engine, the propeller and the ship hull. The developed ship propulsion dynamics model has been validated with a wide range of experimental data from a 500 kW test engine (MAN B&W 5L16/24), coupled to a four quadrant electric brake (AEG), installed at the test-bed of the Laboratory of Marine Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA/LME). The model was then used for the investigation of marine diesel engine behavior during load changing including some extreme maneuvering case scenarios such as Crash Stop, Full Astern and Full Ahead maneuvers. The resulting ship propulsion model is a reduced order model, which can easily be used for detailed studies such as engine-control during fast transient loadings, with accuracy and small computational cost.Copyright © 2006 by ASME