Combustion engine failures

Abstract

The maritime industry transports the majority of all cargo worldwide. The work onboard requires a crew that has competence to safely take the ship from A to B. In the maritime area, hazardous situations where loss of electricity or loss of propulsion can affect the environment and the people involved. Marine combustion engines have complex systems that need to be reliable for both generating electricity and to safely propel the ship for safe trading. The engine room environment is a strenuous area, it´s noisy, humid and vibrating which can affect both how the crew performs jobs and the machinery and its components lifetime. The study is a secondary quantitative analysis which investigates the causes of marine combustion engine failure in the span of 2007-2017 by using reports from the voluntary Insjörapport, submitted to the incident database ForeSea. The database receives accident, incident and near-miss reports from a number of shipping companies mainly located in Scandinavia. The result divides failures into 5 main categories: component, operator, fuel, automation system and uncertain. The most common cause was found a mechanical or electrical component and maintenance by operator. The rest of the reports represent 35% of all failures.