Diagnostic of the piston rod gland’s failure of marine slow speed main engine

The article presents untypical diagnostic of the slow-speed, marine main engine. The engine was newly made-up and checking during mounting process and during sea trial. However, a leak under piston chamber of second cylinder along the piston rod appeared few days after the sea trial. The stuffing box exchange (with the piston rod’s regeneration) did not give expected results − the failure happened again. All geometrical and exploitation parameters was in acceptable range. The ship with main engine was fifth in the series of sister ships. The authors were asked for urgent expert opinion. Mix of different measurements was planned after formulation several hypothesis. Displacements of piston rod and cylinder, a stress level of main engine body, and vibrations level in different points of main engine was performed during short sea voyage. Not a single hypothesis can be considered as the main cause of the failure. It turns out, that a serious failure need not be caused by a single reason. According to snowball theory a sum of small effects, each of them affecting slightly the engine operation, can be a cause of serious failure. In the authors’ opinion, the failure was caused by a sum of relatively slight effects. The probably scenario of the failure process was enunciated. The recommendation for the engine project was formulated: some of the geometrical tolerances should be changed