NSR TRANSIT SIMULATIONS BY THE VESSEL PERFORMANCE SIMULATOR 'VESTA' PART 1 SPEED REDUCTION AND FUEL OIL CONSUMPTION IN THE SUMMER TRANSIT ALONG NSR

摘要

The positive usage of the Northern Sea Route (NSR) is arising as a result of arctic ice melting in recent years. National Maritime Research Institute has developed an advanced vessel performance simulator in ice for accurate estimation of ship performance such as propulsion power, speed reduction and fuel consumption, taking the main engine characteristics into consideration. The vessel performance simulator. "VESTA" has not originally developed in ice but in wave and wind. The authors incorporated two ice resistance models. Kashitelijan-Poznjok-Ryblin's (KPR) for small ice floes and Lindqvist' s for large ice floes, in VESTA for performance calculation in ice. The summer transit of ice-strengthened merchant vessel must be along marginal ice zone with pack ice rather than level ice. Thus we selected the KPR model, which requires ice concentration, thickness and floe size as input parameters of ice. Ice concentration of September from satellite observations was given to the simulator. Ice thickness and floe size were derived from the past onboard observation in the summer voyage along NSR. The ship-type virtually employed was a bulk carrier of 73,000 DWT with 9MW of M/E output. Ship performance was estimated by VESTA along the seaway from Tokyo to Rotterdam via NSR. Several routing scenarios were simulated in order to investigate sensitivities of ice conditions for ship performance. Each route was selected so as to avoid severe ice with ice concentration. The mean ice concentration in the route was ranged from 8% to 33%. The calculation resulted in taking 3 weeks to transit from Tokyo to Rotterdam. The ship speed was up to 14 knots in open water and reduced to about 4 knots in ice. As a conclusion, the simulations showed that the NSR holds potential to reduce shipping cost of 35% as compared with Suez Canal route.