When you’re sailing on a tight schedule, unforeseen downtime can have serious impacts on safety and profitability. By using proactive monitoring from Wärtsilä Expert Insight, Japanese technical manager, MMS Co., Ltd. was able to maintain safety and save money by quickly resolving an engine fault on one of their vessels.
MMS Co., Ltd. has an Optimised Maintenance Agreement with Wärtsilä for three of its vessels. Under this agreement the company’s LNG tanker started using the Wärtsilä Expert Insight service in 2020 for its 2-stroke main engines. MMS wanted a solution where Wärtsilä would monitor the engine parameters and respond rapidly to any potential issues.
Expert Insight is part of Wärtsilä’s Lifecycle Agreements portfolio. The service uses artificial intelligence and advanced diagnostics to monitor vessels, incorporating a set of algorithms that is designed to recognise patterns in data. With the help of a Wärtsilä expert, the service assits in spotting and addressing smaller problems before they develop into bigger issues that could lead to safety risks and costly vessel downtime.
In January 2021, an expert at a Wärtsilä Expertise Centre spotted an anomaly related to the lubricating system on the LNG tanker’s engine. Wärtsilä notified the customer via the Expert Insight collaboration app and guided them to the possible issue: defective lubricating quills or a defective lubricating pump caused by possible internal mechanical failures, or cabling problems.
Avoiding liner damage also meant avoiding potential repairs that could have cost tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of euros and would have been challenging to carry out at sea.
The crew investigated the fault with Wärtsilä’s guidance and were able to find that three of the eight lubricating quills were suffering from injection malfunctions. By replacing them, proper lubrication timing was restored. According to the customer’s feedback, Wärtsilä “drawing attention to the lubrication deadtime feedback was extremely useful and probably prevented liner damage.”
Avoiding liner damage also meant avoiding potential repairs that could have cost tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of euros and would have been challenging to carry out at sea.
Learn more about how Wärtsilä Expert Insight can help keep your vessel up and running and save costs by proactively monitoring your engines and resolving issues before they cause downtime.
Identify anomalies early and avoid costly downtime onboard an LNG tanker sailing to tight schedules
Wärtsilä Expert Insight, which combines engine data monitoring and artificial intelligence insights with Wärtsilä expertise
A lubricating system issue was spotted and fixed before it caused potentially major damage
