Improvements of a failure database for marine diesel engines using the RCM and simulations

Abstract

Diesel engines are widely used in marine transportation as a direct connection to the propeller and as electrical principal or auxiliary generator sets. The engine is the most critical piece of equipment on a vessel platform; therefore, the engine's reliability is paramount in order to optimize safety, life cycle costs, and energy of the boat, and hence, vessel availability. In this paper, the improvements of a failure database used for a four‐stroke high‐speed marine diesel engine are discussed. This type of engine is normally used in military and civil vessels as the main engine of small patrols and yachts and as an auxiliary generator set (GENSET) for larger vessels. This database was assembled by considering “failure modes, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA),” as well as an analysis of the symptoms obtained in an engine failure simulator. The FMECA was performed following the methodology of reliability‐centered maintenance (RCM), while the engine response against failures was obtained from a failure simulator based on a thermodynamic one‐dimensional model created by the authors, which was adjusted and validated with experimental data. The novelty of this work is the methodology applied, which combines expert knowledge of the asset, the RCM methodology, and the failure simulation to obtain an accurate and reliable database for the prediction of failures, which serves as a key element of a diesel engine failure diagnosis system.