Technical Question About The Engines

Chief Engineer Frank de Vries

Howard Bardsley III sent us an e-mail asking why Eurodam has four 12-cylinder and two 8-cylinder engines. Blog Board member and Chief Engineer Frank de Vries gave us such an interesting answer, we thought we’d share it with Howard and everybody else:

The reason that we have four 12-cylinder engines and two 8-cylinder engines is that this configuration gives us more flexibility in regards to the amount of power that we want to generate. Depending on the speed of the ship we need more or less power.

A diesel engine has the optimum efficiency when it runs around 85 percent load. Therefore, we always try to run the engines at that particular load while we are underway.

Having 12- and 8-cylinder engines gives us the possibility to make different combinations, e.g., (2 x 12 + 1 x 8), or (3 x 12 + 1 x 8), or (2 x 12 + 2 x 8), etc. This way, we can always run our engines at 85 percent load and the steps to increase or decrease are not as big as if we only had 12-cylinder engines.

The power output of the engines is 1,000 kilowatt per cylinder, so the total would be 64,000 kilowatts, or 64 megawatts, which equals approximately 85,000 horsepower. That is the maximum load, however, we normally run at 85 percent of that.

The Azipods have a power of 17.6 megawatts each, so a total of 35.2 megawatts, which equals almost 47,000 horsepower.