MUSCAT: Brazil’s Tubarão Port, located in the southeast part of the country, recently received the world’s first very large ore carrier equipped with a rotor sail system. The ship, Sea Zhoushan, is a Guaibamax category VLOC (Very Large Ore Carrier) with a capacity of 325,000 tonnes.
This will be the first operation for the ship, which embarked from a shipyard in China and will return to the same location with a load of iron ore. Throughout the project, 3D modelling was carried out at the loading ports operated by Vale to analyze the ship’s docking.
“The ship was designed to dock at any port. There is no interference caused by the sails during loading since they recline during docking. Tubarão was chosen as the first destination since the teams for nautical engineering, inspection and local operations played a fundamental part throughout the entire testing process and are now collaborating to make minor adjustments to the system,” explains Vale’s Global Head of Shipping & Distribution, Guilherme Brega.
The rotor sails are cylindrical rotors four metres in diameter and 24 metres tall - the equivalent of a seven-story building. During operation, the rotors turn at different speeds depending on the ship’s environmental and operating conditions, creating a pressure difference that propels the ship forward, a phenomenon known as the Magnus effect.
There are five sails installed along the length of the vessel, allowing for an increase of up to 8% efficiency and subsequent reduction of up to 3.4 thousand tonnes of CO2 equivalent per ship per year. If the pilot project proves to be efficient, it is estimated that at least 40 per cent of the fleet will be able to use the technology, which would reduce annual emissions from Vale’s maritime iron ore transport by almost 1.5 per cent.
The installation of the technology, completed by Finnish manufacturer Norsepower, is a project led by Vale, relying on support through its partnership with South Korean shipping company Pan Ocean for installation in one of its VLOCs used by Vale. The company Shanghai Ship and Design Research Institute (SDARI) was responsible for the design and integration of the sail into the vessel. Chinese shipyard New Times Shipbuilding built the ship, which was already adapted to receive the sails installed at another shipyard, PaxOcean Engineering Zhoushan, also in China.
Vale has been compiling studies on the use of wind-assisted ship propulsion technology since 2016. Through the Ecoshipping program, the company has developed various partnerships in cooperation with ITV (Vale Institute of Technology), as well as universities and laboratories in Brazil and Europe. The objective with this project was to assess the best operating conditions for rotor sails in the contracted fleet and verify the benefits of the technology in terms of reduction in fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.
The ship chosen was awaiting construction and moving from detailed design to manufacturing and installation of the equipment took one year. In addition to laboratory testing and numerical analysis, the engineers studied wind patterns on the Brazil-China route. “We discovered that we have an advantage in relation to our competitors: the Brazil-Asia route has, on average, more favourable winds than Australia-Asia”, Brega added.
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