Image Credit: Wärtsilä
The efficiency of the ship’s propeller is an important part of a ship’s overall propulsion efficiency. The Wärtsilä EnergoProFin has become a popular retrofit solution to improve the propulsion efficiency and hence improve the fuel efficiency of many ships already in service.The Wärtsilä EnergoProFin solution, a propeller cap with fins that rotates together with the propeller to produce fuel savings of up to 5%.
Wärtsilä Fixed Pitch Propellers are based on OPTI Design methodology, which ensures optimum performance and minimum levels of noise and vibration by obtaining acceptable pressure pulses on the hull to avoid high propeller induced noise and vibration levels. With the effective CFD calculations analyse not only the propeller performance but most importantly also, the interaction between the propeller and hull. This provides extremely accurate information to achieve design and parametric optimisation. The result is a robust propulsion solution covering the full range of ship operating conditions, and reduced operating costs by using highly efficient hydrodynamic optimised propeller blades.
Figure 1: Cavitation observations for same propeller with and without EnergoProFin (Image Credit: Wärtsilä)
Wärtsilä EnergoProFin serves to improve propulsion performance by weakening the hub vortex. It is tailored to the specifics of the individual propeller, and can be installed quickly and easily which is resulting improvements to overall fuel efficiency.
Source: Wärtsilä (FIXED PITCH PROPELLER OPTI DESIGN)