IEEE Electrification Magazine - June 2015 - 2

ABOUT THIS ISSUE

The Shipboard
Integrated Power
System
By Herbert Ginn and Robert Cuzner

T IS OUR GREAT PLEASURE TO PRESENT THIS SPEcial issue of IEEE Electrification Magazine on electric
ships. Electricity has been used at least in some small
fashion on board ships since as early as the 1870s by some
accounts, and, by the 1930s, it was in widespread use for auxiliary machinery and even turboelectric drives.
Turboelectric drives use electric generators to convert the
mechanical energy of a turbine into electric energy and electric
motors to convert it back into mechanical energy to power the
driveshafts. The benefits of electric drives have long been known
and are discussed in such early documents as the 1908 editions
of The Marine Review. Electric drives allow for a decoupling of the
prime mover from the propellers so that each can operate at
optimum speeds without the need for large and inefficient
mechanical reduction gear sets. Although electric drives have
long been in use, modern shipboard power systems bear little
resemblance to their predecessors of even 30 years ago. Presentday shipboard systems employ power electronics for the management of energy in propulsion and elsewhere. Fuel costs
constitute a large portion of a ship's life-cycle costs, and pressures to improve fuel economy in conjunction with environmental regulations in marine engineering have led to the use of
power-electronic-based drives in ship propulsion and auxiliary
equipment as in other industrial applications. Many commercial
ships are now built with power electronic drives, including passenger ships, tankers, icebreakers, cable-laying ships, and floating offshore platforms.
Additionally, warships have undergone significant changes
since the 1990s as power electronic conversion has begun to
play an increasingly significant role in all new ship designs as
well as ship refurbishment. Because of the navy shipboard environment and the inability to simply apply commercially available motor drives in that environment, the opportunities for
fuel savings that could be achieved by applying variable-speed
drives to the hundreds of fans and pumps that exist on a navy

I

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MELE.2015.2414292
Date of publication: 29 May 2015

2

I E E E E l e c t r i f i cati o n M agaz ine / J UN E 2015

EDITORIAL BOARD
Saifur Rahman
Editor-in-Chief
Virginia Tech
Virginia, USA
srahman@vt.edu
Iqbal Husain
Editor, Electric Vehicles
North Carolina State
University
North Carolina, USA
ihusain2@ncsu.edu
Eduard Muljadi
Coeditor, Electric Vehicles
NREL: Wind Research
Colorado, USA
eduard.muljadi@nrel.gov
Herb Ginn
Editor, Electric Ships
Universitiy of
South Carolina
South Carolina, USA
ginnhl@cec.sc.edu
Robert Cuzner
Coeditor, Electric Ships
University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Wisconsin, USA
Cuzner@uwm.edu
Eduardo Pilo de la
Fuente
Editor, Electric Trains
EPRail Research
and Consulting
Spain
eduardo.pilo@eprail.com
Jose Conrado Martinez
Coeditor, Electric Trains
Directcion de Estrategia
y Desarrollo
Spain
jcmartinez@adif.es
Bulent Sarlioglu
Editor, Electric Planes
University of
Wisconsin-Madison
Wisconsin, USA
bulent@engr.wisc.edu

Mohammad
Shahidehpour
Editor, Off-Grid
Illinois Institute
of Technology
Chicago, USA
ms@iit.edu
Steve Pullins
Coeditor, Off-Grid
Horizon Energy Group
Tennessee, USA
spullins@horizonenergy
group.com
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Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MELE.2015.2413433
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Electrification Magazine - June 2015
