This fuel at room temperature is a tar like substance and is heated to decrease its viscosity. It is then run through centrifugal separators to get rid of impurities prior to being fed to the engines
One theory that I've seen, that sounds plausible, is that contaminated fuel clogged the fuel filters for the generators, causing the generators to stop. Perhaps the ship didn't have centrifugal separators, or the separators didn't filter out enough impurities to prevent clogging the filters.
The bunker oil used as fuel on ships like this one is the dregs of the petroleum refining process and often contains gunk that may be problematic.
All of this should be easy enough to figure out as the ship is still intact and presumably there's data logging that will point to the cause of the problem.
coastal areas and ports are sulfur emission controlled areas, so there they run bunker A which is basically diesel
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coastal areas and ports are sulfur emission controlled areas, so there they run bunker A which is basically diesel
Sometimes they run cleaner fuel when in port and switch to the dirty stuff when at sea.
yep, and if they are going to shut down the engines. Don't want things to cool down with the thick fuel that needs to be hot
Even the lowest grade bunker fuel is lower in sulfur than it used to be. In fact, that change has contributed to global warming because higher sulfur emissions tended to mitigate warming.
yes, the global limit was lowered to 0.5% from (afair) 3.5% in 2020, I think in ports and coastal areas it is ~0.1%
Contaminated fuel causing this issue is highly unlikely. If it were, the ship would of stayed blacked out. The fact that power was reenergised in short times indicates an electrical fault
Main engines are always stopped in port, ALWAYS
Main Engines are designed to run on heavy fuel oil (HFO) you can't change fuel on the fly and the cost of running a vessel on anything approaching diesel would be prohibitively expensive and need a completely different engine.
Then there' the matter of being able to carry the volume of any fuel other than HFO to be able to make the voyage.
The fuel oil tanks are at capacity when setting off.
If it were feasible to change the fuel type you would need the ship to drop anchor and change out major engine components.
Simply throwing a valve from one fuel to another is not what would happen you would have to clean out the cylinder liners and the scum deposits internally would require waiting for the main engine to cool down, remove heads and possibly liners and pistons and having people climb into the scrubbers to clean them out.
You have to remember that fuel ignition is caused by compressing the fuel air mixture, causing it to heat up and the fire. There is no "spark plug" that determines when it fires.
The firing point is determined by the stroke of the piston and bore diameter.
Not to mention the different operating temperatures caused by using different types of fuels. This alone would require fundamental mechanical engineering properties of the engine to change as heat exchangers would need to be different based the different heat generated from different fuels
As for who's fault this is, I would be looking at the port authority who allowed a vessel to navigate past what is an intrinsically flimsy bridge to move through this area without tug boats. Sure bow thrusters are installed to mitigate tug cost but it is electrical equipment which is prone to fail without notice and to not have a backup for this the outcome could be predicted by anyone who has the slightest idea of what hazard analysis is.
Given the power generation is at the back of the ship and bow thrusters are at the front of it and the typical length of a ship is 300-400m, voltage drop on startup is huge.
I have seen some vessels employ large transformers to increase the generated 415 3 phase voltage to 3.3kV to reduce the cable size feeding the bow thruster motors but I am not entirely sure this is standard practice.
Haven't seen any concrete evidence this vessel even has a bow thruster. If it doesn't then certainly a port authority issue for not using tug boats to manoeuvrer the ship out of the harbour.
Lets also not forget that when pilots are on board they're captaining the ship so the responsibility is on them not the master