Reederei Laeisz' new car carriers

Bearing wear monitoring to ensure operational safety and limit off-hire for for 8 new car carriers

When the German shipping company Reederei F. Laeisz gets its eight new state-of-the-art car carriers, they will all be delivered with an OPENpredictor™ Bearing Wear Monitoring system on their 9-cylinder MAN B&W engine. The 13.398 dwt vessels are pure car and truck carriers (PCTCs), able to transport 5,000 vehicles on 11 car decks between Far East, Europe and America.

 “We decided to install continuous bearing wear monitoring on our new car carriers for two reasons,” says Harald Schlotfeldt, Managing Technical Director of Reederei F. Laeisz. “First and foremost we want to ensure operational safety by avoiding breakdown due to bearing damage. With OPENpredictor™ we can detect developing wear well in advance and plan corrective actions in due time, thereby limiting off-hire and out of service time. A car carrier’s time in port is very short with less than a day to move all vehicles in or out. So it is crucial that we reach ports in time with roll-on/roll-off equipment ready when the planned berthing slot is free at the car terminal.”

Secondly, OPENpredictor™ will be used to closely monitor and collect data about the operation of the 9-cylinder engines from the commissioning and through their entire lifetime. Later Reederei F. Laiesz will look into the opportunity to use the predictive maintenance information to avoid open-up inspections together with our classification society Germanischer Lloyd, and to integrate information from the condition monitoring system with their GL ShipManager system.

According to Mr. Schlotfeldt, “the shipping community is often quite conservative and takes long time to adopt new technologies. Why make investments and change things that work, people seems to think. But at Reederei Laeisz we find the idea of condition monitoring and condition based maintenance very interesting, not only to improve our bottom line but more for safer vessel operation.”

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