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Laboratory infrastructure
Experimental facilities, surface and prototyping equipment, onboard measurement capability and computing resources available to the group’s research and to its industrial partners.
Bruker UMT-3SYS tribometer
One instrument, three interchangeable modules for the contact types that matter in marine machinery.
Thrust bearings — disc-on-disc experiments
- Maximum bearing diameter 120 mm; maximum bearing load 1,000 N; maximum rotational speed 2,000 rpm.
- Oil sump, oil supply and a custom installation system that accepts fixed-pad thrust bearings (pocket design) as well as textured specimens.
- Measured quantities: thrust load, friction torque, minimum film thickness, pressures and temperatures.
The same rig is used to compare measured pressure and temperature fields with CFD thermohydrodynamic predictions on textured and untextured pads.
Journal bearings
- Maximum bearing diameter 40 mm; maximum bearing load 1,000 N; rotational speed up to 15,000 rpm.
- Oil pump, RPM controller, custom journal-bearing assembly and bearing specimens, with the DAQ computer.
- Measured quantities: vertical load, friction torque, pressures, temperatures and misalignment.
Piston rings — reciprocating motion
- Reciprocating and linear drives reproduce the ring–liner contact of a diesel engine.
- Measured quantities: vertical load, friction force, pressures and temperatures.
Large-scale bearing test bed
Full-size operating conditions, not just the model scale.
- Two completely controllable 75 kW electric motors with 75 mm diameter shafts.
- Variable speed control from 0 to 700 rpm.
- Applied bearing load range of 0.1 to 5.0 MPa.
- Bearing misalignment angles up to 0.5 mrad.
The bed was built to study large bearings under realistic load, misalignment and speed combinations — the conditions in which stern-tube and line-shaft bearings actually operate.
Multi-bearing shaft-alignment test bed
A physical twin of a real ship’s shafting line, so that elastic alignment can be measured, not only computed.
- Three-bearing physical twin of the shafting line of the bulk carrier STAR CLEO (Starbulk).
- All bearings placed on load cells for real-time load monitoring.
- Bearings equipped with proximity probes to measure bearing state.
- LVDT sensors to measure shaft position and the elastic line.
- Dedicated lubrication system.
This rig was the model-scale verification platform of the i-MARINE programme, where computed bearing reactions for optimal and “marginally acceptable” alignment states were validated against measurements.
Measurement, surface and prototyping equipment
The instruments that turn a hypothesis into a measured result.
Optical profilometer — Bruker Contour GT-KO
- Optical surface-roughness measurement and wear measurement.
- Accuracy of about 1 nm.
- Used to characterise textured surfaces, roughness fields and wear scars.
iSLA 300 stereolithography 3D printer
- High-performance resin printer installed in the Laboratory of Marine Engineering.
- Laser beam power 3,000 mW; manufacturing accuracy 0.05 mm (parts under 0.1 mm).
- Maximum specimen size 300 × 300 × 300 mm.
Small-scale bearing system
- Bentley Nevada Rotor kit, rev. 4 (journal bearing test rig) with its data-acquisition systems: DAQ cards, amplifiers and conditioners, proximity probes and rotational-speed transducers.
Contact angle / drop-shape analysis
- Experimental apparatus for drop-shape analysis, developed in-house.
- Static, advancing and receding contact angles with an accuracy of ±0.5°.
- Surface characterisation for hydrophobic and superhydrophobic specimens.
Sound and vibration measurement
- Type 1 microphones, uniaxial and triaxial accelerometers, signal conditioners and a DAQ system.
- Used for machinery vibration measurement, modal testing and acoustic characterisation of enclosed spaces.
Computation
- Windows/Linux high-performance cluster with 500 cores (2 GB RAM per core, 6 TB storage; 520 cores in total) and 6 × NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPUs.
- Access to parallel supercomputers.
- Campus licences for ANSYS, ABAQUS, NASTRAN, CAD and pre-processing software (including ANSA from BETA CAE).
Onboard measurements
The laboratory follows the machine to sea: the same quantities are measured on board a ship in service.
- Strain-gauge installations on the shafting, with telemetry, for torque and bending measurements.
- LVDT sensors for shaft position and bearing offsets.
- Binsfeld TorqueTrak 10K for shaft torque measurement, on board and in the laboratory.
- Type 1 microphones and accelerometers with DAQ for sound and vibration surveys.
- Testo 350 Maritime portable emission analyser for onboard exhaust-gas measurements.
Onboard work supports shaft-alignment verification, engine–propeller matching, shaft power and torque measurement, vibration surveys and machinery failure investigation.
Laboratory of Marine Engineering
The group works within the School’s Laboratory of Marine Engineering.
- Founded in 1977; research on marine engines and ship propulsion systems.
- Studies of ship engine and propeller interaction.
- Investigation of marine engine efficiency, reduced fuel consumption and reduced emissions.
- Test-bed facility with dynamometers that can be coupled to engines of up to 1,000 kW, allowing complex dynamic-loading experiments.
In-house software. Alongside commercial FEM and CFD packages the group maintains its own C++ codes for shaft-alignment calculations, for journal-bearing calculations (steady-state and transient, with misalignment, wear, spatial variation of lubricant viscosity and Elrod–Adams mass-conserving cavitation) and for single- and multi-objective optimisation with evolutionary algorithms and local search methods.