Developments in variable speed drive system technology, improvements in performance and reliability and significant reductions in equipment cost have led to widespread and increasing popularity of electric propulsion for ships. Electric propulsion now dominates many vessel types including cruise ships, offshore construction vessels, drilling vessels and icebreakers and is gaining in popularity for large offshore support vessels and LNG carriers.

Electric propulsion can offer many benefits including:

• More flexibility in vessel layout.
• Better damage resilience due to the ability to distribute power generation and propulsion equipment into segregated fire and flood zones.
• Improved reliability from integrated blackout prevention measures such as automatic load limitation, load reduction and phaseback.
• Generally, much higher levels of propulsion redundancy and resilience.
• Improved operational efficiencies and better power management.
• The ability to easily integrate hybrid energy saving technologies and fully electric solutions for zero emissions operation.
• Reduced emissions and zero emissions for fully electric solutions.
• Lower levels of noise and vibration.

MJR Power & Automation are approved UK marine and offshore partners for ABB, Danfoss and Siemens for marine propulsion drives and have delivered a number of turnkey electric propulsion system projects covering design, class approval, construction, installation and commissioning. This includes interface with third party power management, energy management and dynamic positioning systems.

We can offer both AC and DC solutions for diesel electric, hybrid and fully electric propulsion, with various technologies for harmonic mitigation including:

• 6 pulse front ends with parallel harmonic filtering (active or passive).
• 12 pulse (and higher) front ends.
• Active front end (AFE) for naturally low harmonic performance.
• Common AC or common DC grid based architecture.

We can also advise on and integrate all types of harmonic mitigation measures into the design to ensure that the drive system does not disturb the main electrical network and cause problems with other sensitive equipment. Similar solutions can also be provided for high power mission critical drive systems for applications such as drilling, pipelaying and cable laying equipment.