When she was delivered from the Kawasaki Heavy Industries Shipbuilding & Engine Works in Nagasaki in 1995, NYK Vega (now MSC Messina) was one of the largest container vessels afloat.
She was equipped with a very sophisticated power generation and management system which enabled the vessel to operate at maximum efficiency by recovering as much waste heat produced by the main engine as possible and converting it to electrical power and/or auxiliary propulsion.
During normal sea passage if the electrical demand was low, electrical power produced by a steam turbine using steam generated by the main engine exhaust gas boiler, could be automatically used to drive the shaft generator as a motor in propulsion assist mode.
When electrical demand was high, the steam turbine together with the constant frequency shaft generator system could operate in parallel to produce enough power to supply the vessels entire electrical load.
Over time the system had suffered a number of electrical and mechanical failures and had been out of operation for several years. In addition to this one of the four 1600kw diesel generators and the turbo generator had suffered catastrophic mechanical failure leaving only 3 remaining diesels operating.
The owner decided to replace the failed diesel and turbo generator and attempt to re-commission the complete system.
After several unsuccessful attempts by other companies, we were contacted by the owner’s representative and over several European port rotations we took over the entire project and delivered it to a very successful conclusion.
Deliverables included…
- Full electrical control, power and instrumentation installation and integration of replacement diesel and turbo generators.
- Substantial modifications to the main switchboard.
- Re-calibration and testing of overcurrent protection and switchgear.
- Calibration and testing of all sensors, transmitters.
- Design and installation of a retrofit excitation system for the turbo generator.
- Re-commissioning of shaft generator constant frequency power thyristor converter.
- Re-commissioning of Terasaki GAC-5 GCU.
- Full system trial.