From steam ships to modern diesel ships, boiler water testing has been a mundane task for ship’s engineers. Boiler water is as important in steam ships as blood in humans. High pressure boilers and steam turbine’s health mainly depends on quality of boiler water. Modern diesel ships are usually equipped with low pressure boilers and exhaust gas economizers. Boiler water treatment on board diesel ships are not as critical as in steam ships. Nevertheless, in general, boiler tube failures/ruptures are more in diesel ships than in steam ships. The main reason behind most failures or improper boiler water testing & dosage.
This innovation from Wilhelmsen Ships Service (WSS) will be a great boon to the maritime industry. Wilhelmsen Ships Service (WSS) has launched a first-of-its-kind automated boiler water maintenance system that is in final testing on Color Line ferry Color Magic and on WSS vessels. It constantly measures boiler water conditions and automatically doses chemicals when required. This process is usually manual, with crew testing the waters and adjusting the chemicals themselves.
At the heart of the system are four sensors per boiler, which allow the solution to autocorrect by reducing the amount of chemicals dosed to the system.
The solution sends the results to the cloud as well as displaying the results offline on the vessel – and is the first boiler system to send results to the cloud. The tailor-made desktop dashboard streams live critical boiler water information, which is accessible by ship operators 24/7.
Wilhelmsen aims to set up a database covering all the ferry fleets using their boiler water treatment solution so that ship operators can benchmark their vessels’ results against the anonymous data using age, size of ferry etc to see how efficient their boiler is compared to the market average. This solution will be available for other vessel types in addition to the ferry fleet. Highlighting the benefits, WSS water solutions business manager Rune Nygaard said: “Our system is more accurate than a manual test, and will extend the lifetime of the boiler, because if chemicals are used correctly, it will not corrode.”
Did you subscribe for our daily newsletter?
It’s Free! Click here to Subscribe!
Source: Wilhelmsen Ships Service
