December 2^nd: The Project Expands in Scope

At the Southampton boat show this year (September 2007) I participated, as I do every year, in the Yachting Monthly/Blue Water Rallies cruising seminar (www.yachtrallies.co.uk). At this seminar I met Ken Wittamore, who is a marine technical adviser to the European Union (EU). One thing led to another, and now I am busy helping to put together a consortium of European companies to investigate the carbon footprint reduction potential of marine hybrid systems, with Malo’s 46 as a test boat!

This past few weeks has been a blur of proposal writing, emails and phone conversations. It’s all coming along rather nicely. We will get the principal players together at the Dusseldorf Boat Show in January and see whether or not this can be translated into a viable project. In the meantime, it’s added a new dimension to the build process for the test boat.

When I last wrote I was committed to getting the hybrid generator and propulsion motor to Malo as soon as possible. The motor is now there, thanks to quite a bit of help from Gary Gloceri at the manufacturer, BlueWav Systems (www.wavecrestlabs.com). The generator (from Polar Power – www.PolarPowerInc.com) has got from California as far as the Netherlands, and so is not quite there. The stop in the Netherlands is a fall-out from the EU project.

In October 2007, Victron Energy (www.VictronEnergy.com), a battery charger and inverter manufacturer, staged what is, to date, the most ambitious test of marine AC generators ever conducted. I was there for a week as they put 20 generators through their paces. Victron’s primary interest was in finding out how different generators worked with their MultiPlus and Quattro inverters, which have the capability to synchronize (parallel) with shorepower and onboard generators (I’ll have an article on this in the February/March issue of Professional Boatbuilder magazine – www.ProBoat.com). My primary interest was in the relative fuel consumption numbers logged during the tests.

For these tests, Victron established a sophisticated fuel monitoring and data logging facility, which they have decided to keep operational. Over the course of the week, and at other times, we had extensive conversations about the test boat, diesel-electric technologies, and the EU project. Victron is shaping up to be one of the key EU players, not just in terms of supplying the various battery chargers (144 volt, 24 volt and 12 volt), converters (144-volt DC to 24- and 12-volt DC), and inverters (144-volt DC and 24-volt DC to 120-volt AC), but also in terms of designing a sophisticated Energy Management Module (EMM) that can optimize the efficiency of the hybrid system.

When Matthijs Vader, son of Victron’s owner Reinout Vader, heard we were about to ship the generator from California to Malo in Sweden, he said: “Why don’t you send it here, and we’ll test it before it goes in the boat”. That’s an offer we couldn’t refuse, so now it’s in the Netherlands. I have always believed that DC generators (this one is 144-volts DC) are inherently more efficient across a wide range of loads than AC. In another week, we’ll have the hard data.

Victron is the technological cutting edge of marine battery chargers and inverters. It had always been my intention to use their products on the new boat, so this has been an extremely opportune connection and set of events.

Back in the UK, the EnerSys people have been conducting preliminary harsh cycling tests of the Odyssey Thin Plate Pure Lead (TPPL) batteries we will be using in the boat, with impressive early results. By the time we get to do the commissioning tests (June 2008) we should have a pretty good idea of how to optimize the use of these batteries in hybrid applications (I have an article on these batteries coming out in the December/January issue of Professional Boatbuilder magazine).

We are also in the early stages of formulating a propeller testing regimen. The hybrid diesel-electric aficionados always argue that the different torque characteristics of electric motors versus diesel engines can be translated into greater efficiency at the propeller. I’ve never quite understood this, but am keen to find out since the typical propeller in a sailboat is only 50% efficient – there are potentially greater gains to be made here than at any other point in the propulsion system. Dave Tether at Electric Marine Propulsion (www.ElectricMarinePropulsion.com) has more anecdotal experience in this field than anyone else in the world. Hopefully, he, and Adrian Miles of Bruntons Propellers (www.Bruntons-propellers.com), and maybe the folks at Volvo-Penta (who have a great deal of propeller experience) will put together a program to get some answers. Malo is willing to use their travel hoist and facilities to pull the boat in and out of the water to change propellers multiple times.

While in the Netherlands at Victron’s generator testing, I made a side trip to visit Rinze van der Schuit at Smart Rigging (www.SmartRigging.com) to see what it might cost to replace the standing rigging on the boat with fiber rigging (PBO). It is possible to get the total rig weight down to an astonishing 9 kgs (20 lbs), which would help to compensate for some of the extra weight in the hybrid system and its batteries, but the cost of this technology is still high (I am sure it will come down as volumes increase; I have an article on fiber rigging in the October/November issue of Professional Boatbuilder magazine.)

In the meantime Malo has been pushing on at a rapid pace with the boat. The interior is already starting to take shape. Most of the cabinet work will be completed by January, and then the focus turns to the systems (Malo is unusual compared to most modern production boat builders in as much as the systems go in towards the end of the build process, rather than at the beginning; I much prefer it this way because it means nothing gets buried in totally inaccessible places).

I have booked a couple of trips to Sweden for January and February, the first to have a final review of the systems before installation, and the second to be present when the Capi2 distributed power system goes in.