Siemens Gets Two Cruise Ship Contracts

The Siemens Industrial Solutions and Services Group (I&S) will equip two cruise ships of the Caribbean Princess class with power-supply, propulsion and automation systems. The contracts – worth a cumulative EUR 28 million – for the job were awarded by the Italian shipbuilding group Fincantieri - Cantieri Navali Italiani S.p.A., Trieste.

The ships are being built for and will be handed over to Princess Cruises and another brand of Carnival Corporation & plc. shipping company. Handover is scheduled for the beginning of 2007 for the first vessel and the beginning of 2008 for the other one.

Like five cruise ships before them, the two ships being built for the Carnival Corporation will be fitted with a diesel-electric propulsion system, a power-supply system and also automation equipment for controlling and monitoring all onboard functions. The main diesel-electric propulsion system has an output of two times 21 megawatts. The two propeller motors of the main propulsion system work with a very low level of noise emission and vibration. This substantially increases passenger comfort. In addition, diesel-electric drives are very environment-friendly. When the diesel-electric drives are operated within the rated load range, the emission of pollutants is considerably less than that of conventional diesel drives.

The propulsion system is based on the Simar Drive Synchro concept, whereby a synchronous motor is supplied with power via a line-side converter, a DC link and a load-side converter. The Simadyn D digital dynamic control system is responsible for controlling the drives Siemens is supplying six synchronous generators with a total output of 81.6 MVA to provide electrical energy on the ship. A Siemens energy management system will be used to distribute the power. The heart of the installation is a medium-voltage switchgear unit of the type NXAir. It guarantees a high level of availability and easy adaptation to the current on-board power requirement. In addition, the energy management system will have an open interface for link-up to the Siship Imac 55 ship automation system. The latter performs all the monitoring, alarm and control functions on board. Process control takes place via distributed units that are connected to each other by means of local networks. Siship Imac 55 collects and processes data from around 15,000 measuring points in different parts of the ship. The whole process can be controlled at 15 operator workstations on the basis of 350 plant mimic diagrams.