A Study on Application of Electric Propulsion System using AFE Rectifier for Small Coastal Vessels

The small coastal vessel registered in Korea, small coastal vessels with a gross tonnage of 10 tons or less account for 94.6 % and among them, aged vessels over 16 years age indicate 40.6 %. In order to reduce GHG emissions from small coast vessels, discussions are underway to replace aging ships' propulsion units with eco - friendly propulsion facilities, and the electric propulsion ship is emerging as one of the measures. The electric propulsion system using the DFE rectifier, which was applied in the conventional large commercial vessel, was effective in reducing the harmonics and improving the DC output voltage of the DC link stage, but it occupied a large volume and caused an increase in the overall system price. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an electric propulsion system using AFE rectifier with a small volume of system that can be applied to a small coastal vessel. In order to analyze the effectiveness of the overall system, the load profile was applied to obtain accurate and rapid speed tracking performance of the propulsion motor affected by the speed load. In addition, the power factor and total harmonic distortion factor of the voltage and current on the improved power output side are derived through simulation.