A Novel Control Technique for Performance Improvement of a Ship

In every marine used for international transportation of goods, an engineer operates the steering gear pump manually, and accordingly, the ship gets directed. Also the engineer has to look after the repairs against different faults. Such a ship might stay in the sea for longer durations. Hence, the engineer working on the ship should be very alert during daytime as well as during night-time to look after these activities. Repairing of faults may be a manual operation, and time required to clear the fault may be very high. Adopting automatic control system, which can reduce down time of the ship, can reveal this difficulty. The introduction of automated separation technology enhances the performance and control of the vessel, offering numerous benefits in terms of efficiency, safety, and ease of operation (Samuel in Turk J Comput Math Educ 12(12):3490–3498, [1]). In this paper, a novel technique is presented to isolate the faulty part automatically. This technique is designed and developed using various contactors and the system is automated to operate during faulty conditions. The system will provide independent operation of steering gear in healthy as well as in the faulty conditions. The developed hardware is tested for its performance based on time required to isolate the faulty part and to achieve independent operation. The performance of the ship during normal, abnormal conditions, and during occurrence of fault is evaluated. The isolation time required with automation is drastically reduced to less than 1s which was about 10s for fault of low oil pressure and 5s for the fault of very low oil pressure.