During the course of the £3 million project, funded and developed as a partnership with the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), Teignbridge Propellers has investigated three innovative areas of propeller performance improvement, targeted at the reduction of fuel and associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the large fleet Handysize bulk carriers and product tankers, ferries, offshore service vessels and container feeders that operate in UK waters. The innovations and associated learning however, can be applied to almost all commercial, leisure and military vessels. The three areas of innovation in the project include: 1) Development of an integrated 'ship as a system' design process to enable optimisation of the blade geometry for maximum hydrodynamic efficiency followed by testing of the optimised performance in the context of a realistic representation of the vessel's mission profile. The process typically delivers a 3.5% to 4.0% increase in hydrodynamic efficiency over a baseline performance of the equivalent Wageningen B-Series propeller +1.0% (typical representation of the vessels operating in this fleet). 2) Development of a replaceable blade concept - the Clamp on Blade (CoB) propeller. The CoB has a smaller hub to diameter ratio than any other replaceable blade propeller on the market The innovative design also enables a bolt head free blade palm. This pair of features improves efficiency by more than 2.0% over competing designs. 3) Development of a pitch modification system - currently in proof of concept scale prototyping phase. Watch this space!
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