Technical reliability of shipboard technologies for the application of alternative fuels

Background: Naval traffic is highly dependent on depleting fossil resources and causes significant greenhouse gasemissions. At the same time, marine transportation is a major backbone of world trade. Thus, alternative fuel conceptsare highly needed. Different fuels such as ammonia, methanol, liquefied natural gas and hydrogen have been proposed.For some of them, first prototype vessels have been in operation. However, practical experience is still limited.Most studies so far focus on aspects such as efficiency and economics. However, particularly in marine applications,reliability of propulsion systems is of utmost importance, because failures on essential ship components at sea posea huge safety risk. If the respective components lose their functionality, repair can be much more challenging due tolarge distances to dockyards and the complicated transport of spare parts to the ship. Consequently, evaluation ofreliability should be a core element of system analysis for new marine fuels.Results: In this study, reliability was studied for four potential fuels. The analysis involved several steps: estimation ofoverall failure rates, identification of most vulnerable components and assessment of criticality by including severityof fault events. On the level of overall failure rate, ammonia is shown to be very promising. Extending the view overa pure failure rate-based evaluation shows that other approaches, such as LOHC or methanol, can be competitive interms of reliability and risk. As different scenarios require different weightings of the different reliability criteria, theconclusion on the best technology can differ. Relevant aspects for this decision can be the availability of technicalstaff, high-sea or coastal operation, the presence of non-naval personnel onboard and other factors.Conclusions: The analysis allowed to compare different alternative marine fuel concepts regarding reliability. However,the analysis is not limited to assessment of overall failure rates, but can also help to identify critical elementsthat deserve attention to avoid fault events. As a last step, severity of the individual failure modes was included. Forthe example of ammonia, it is shown that the decomposition unit and the fuel cell should be subject to measures forincreasing safety and reducing failure rates.Keywords: Resilience, Dependability, Energy storage, FME