Modelling of the propulsion plant of a large container ship by the partition of the cycle of the main diesel engine

In this article, a mathematical replica of the propulsive installation of a large container ship is presented. The ship propulsion is accomplished by a large two-stroke marine diesel engine driving a marine propeller. The main new idea introduced by this research consists in using the Subsystem-Enabling feature available in the MATLAB Simulink^® environment to control the execution of the working sequences of the main propulsion two-stroke diesel engine. The benefits brought by this model implementation approach are its simplicity and its applicability to all the blocks of the diesel engine model, these blocks can be created to represent one engine working sequence and then duplicated to represent the remaining engine sequences, and finally, the blocks related to each sequence can be grouped in subsystems and controlled by a single subsystem monitoring the engine events according to the value of the crankshaft angle; consequently, the overall Simulink model building and execution processes are much faster. The results generated by the simulation using the Simulink model of this diesel ship propulsion plant show that, for the production of acceptable results, only a small portion of the input data of the model needs to be exactly provided by the manufacturers of the components of the propulsion plant, whereas the rest of the data can be given reasonable initial values and adjusted during the model’s fine-tuning process. Finally, it is worth noting that the considerable amount of simulator-input-data available in this article can be used in any other simulation work to develop an identical simulator to the simulator of this article or to build a different one from scratch.