Contact

Most vessels can be electrified, either fully or partially. Conditions like availability of charging infrastructure, route length, available charging time, and maximum weight requirements can impact to what degree av vessel can be electrified. Many larger ships install batteries to become more energy efficient or handle peak loads.

How fast a battery can charge, and discharge energy is called C-rate. High C-rates means faster charging. C-rates are closely related to the batteries underlying chemistry and other system components. The time it takes to fully charge a battery is also determined by its size. The smaller the battery, the faster it can be fully charged. Therefore, when designing a battery system, the optimal size is as small as possible while still supplying the energy needed for the operation at hand.

They can be huge, but it depends. Size is limited by how much the vessel can carry and still safely operate in relation to the power it needs. That means, that the ultimate size and weight is determined by the energy requirement for the given application, and its access to charging infrastructure. In maritime, the smaller the system, the better.

Comparing weight per kWh between different systems will be misleading. Systems that require less buffer energy to meet the energy requirements over the lifetime, will be lighter on system level, even though they might be heavier when compared on a kWh-basis. To know the exact weight for the system, the operational profile needs to be understood.

The lifetime of a battery, or its cycle life is mostly dependent on the underlying battery chemistry. It is also dependent on how the battery is being used over the planned lifetime. The level of usage, or DOD (depth of discharge) is an important variable when designing a system that will be in use for a long time.

It depends. To calculate a system price, a number of factors needs to be known. This is what we call the operational profile. The cost per kWh can be misleading since the system size (number of kWh) can sometimes be substantially less, than what is recognized at first analysis.

Safety is a huge issue for batteries in general, and for maritime batteries specifically. A safe battery system requires several layers of system characteristics and measurements. The cell chemistry that is used in the battery is fundamental, on top of that all systems need monitoring and prevention methods, as well as suppression systems, gas vents, sprinklers etc.