AIDA Cruises, the German contemporary market unit in the Carnival Corp & plc group, says it has installed an energy monitoring and management system on board its vessels.
"With the installation of the highly innovative energy monitoring and management system EMMA by ABB, AIDA Cruises sets new standards for the energy management onboard of its fleet. In addition to collecting a huge database of operational and technical information, the systems main function is to give real-time decision support for operating the ship and its systems as close to the optimum as possible," the company said in a statement. One of its most important features is its direct link to the ships automation system as well as to the shore-side organisation of AIDA Cruises.
With its comprehensive scientific approach to analysing operational data, ABB`s EMMA provides an enormous potential for improving the fleets energy performance. As of now, the new energy monitoring system has already been set up and commissioned on six AIDA ships and will be installed onto the whole fleet. Just months after the first installations, the system has allowed AIDA to identify important focus areas and to assign new priorities for both technical improvements as well as optimising operations.
"At AIDA we've realised that in order to achieve maximum efficiency, we must approach energy management onboard clinically and scientifically. This is why we installed ABB`s EMMA. The biggest benefit of having such an advanced energy management system onboard is that mathematically analysed key performance indicators are at your fingertips, not only raw data," says Jens Lassen, Senior Vice President Marine Operations at AIDA Cruises.
"AIDA is recognised as one of the most environmentally friendly cruise operators and the company sets high demands for the solutions it deploys onboard the vessels. We are pleased that AIDA selected ABBs EMMA energy monitoring and management system to further improve the environmental footprint of their fleet", says Heikki Soljama, Managing Director for ABBs marine and ports business.
Overall, 500 signals per second are transmitted from the ships automation system to the EMMA virtual machine. The seven top-level categories that are tracked are: propulsion power, propulsion efficiency, vessel trim, hotel and auxiliary power, air condition power per person, specific fuel oil consumption of the main diesel generators as well as total fuel consumption.
This gives valuable information to the crew and allows for a detailed drill-down of each parameter if needed. Systems and singular set-points on board can be adjusted as needed, contributing to an energy-efficient operation of the ship. Examples of this may be changing the engine configuration and loading, route planning with speed management or by optimising the trim or waste heat recovery.
