Effects of scrubber installation on a fishing boat on the variation in engine performance

Marine diesel engines use fuel oil, which is much inferior to that used in vehicles. The degraded fuel oil contains high sulfur, asphalt, and metallic impurities, and is highly viscous. The vessel stakeholder can choose either to use very low sulfur fuel oil (VLSFO) or install a scrubber to comply with the requirement. However, scrubber costs remain too high and make them suitable only for large container vessels. Therefore, this study proposes to design, construct, and test a small-scale economic scrubber for fishing vessels. An engine dynamometer will be used to test the engine performance after the scrubber installation. The experimental results show that installing a tailpipe scrubber increased the fuel consumption rate and the brake-specific fuel consumption (BSFC). Compared with the effects of injecting 3 detergents into the scrubber to mix with the diesel engine exhaust gas, the experimental results show that less excess inlet air is required with the seawater agent. The exhaust gas temperature is slightly higher for the freshwater case. Seawater is the most readily available for fishing vessels in operation. The results demonstrated that the scrubber has been successfully designed, fabricated, and tested. The installation of the scrubber in the engine exhaust system was found to slightly degrade engine performance, including BSFC. Moreover, the scrubber designed in this study achieves a good balance between construction costs and reasonable modulation of engine performance.