A company that has gathered some 5,000 ship years of data through a product it claims is in use on ‘hundreds of tankers, container ships, bulkers, roros and cargo vessels’ is leveraging its database to offer a new service to charterers.
Propulsion Dynamics said its Inferred Fuel Performance service gives charterers a ‘sneak peek’ of the way a vessel could be expected to perform before they charter the vessel.
It works by using combined vessel performance information Propulsion Dynamics has captured over more than 15 years, and company president Daniel Kane said the service would provide a prediction even for vessels not present in the company database.
Using the IMO number, he said, “we are able to locate ships of similar dimensions in our … database, we then take the hydrodynamic correction factors for those ships with similar dimensions and estimate clean ship performance found from trials”.
By considering factors including ship age, time out of dock, AIS-based service patterns and prior hull/propeller treatments, Mr Kane said the software was able to assign a likely added resistance to the ship. This added resistance factor allows the service to generate fuel performance curves corrected for multiple sea states, draft and speed regimes.
Propulsion Dynamics is positioning the Inferred Fuel Performance service as a vetting tool for charterers grappling with a predicted jump in the cost of some fuels with the onset of a global cap on sulphur levels in marine fuel in 2020.
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