Scientific Contributions Oil and Gas
Vol 48 No 4 (2025)

Improvement of Operating Performance of Medium-Speed Marine Diesel Engines Using Marine Diesel Oil with Air Microbubbles

Hideo Kawahara (National Defense Academy)
Tomohiro Sunada (National Institute of Technology, Oshima College)
Yasuhito Nakatake (National Institute of Technology, Kurume College)
Koichi Terasaka (Keio University)
Hiroshi Kawahara (Mes Tokki & Engineering)
Hidechika Goto (Mes Tokki & Engineering)



Article Info

Publish Date
21 Nov 2025

Abstract

Marine diesel engines are widely adopted as the main auxiliary engines in ships because of their ability to utilize inexpensive heavy fuel oil and their high thermal efficiency per unit engine. This study focuses on practical marine medium-speed diesel engines to investigate the impact of introducing air as fine bubbles into low-sulfur A heavy fuel oil on the operating performance. The results indicated that when fine bubbles were introduced into the fuel, the engine exhibited poor combustion and became unstable at any load when Qa was 0.4 L/min or higher. However, when Qa was below 0.4 L/min, the fuel efficiency improvement increased significantly with increasing load, reaching a maximum reduction of 4.5% at 75% load and Qa = 0.3 L/min. Regarding the exhaust gas characteristics, at low loads, no significant changes were observed in the CO2 and NOx emissions with varying microbubble injection levels. However, at loads of 75% or higher, both the CO2 and NOx emissions decreased as the microbubble injection level increased. Furthermore, introducing fine bubbles into the fuel promoted atomization after fuel injection, similar to the results for heated C heavy oil, leading to improved heat generation rates across the entire engine load range.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

SCOG

Publisher

Subject

Chemical Engineering, Chemistry & Bioengineering Energy

Description

The Scientific Contributions for Oil and Gas is the official journal of the Testing Center for Oil and Gas LEMIGAS for the dissemination of information on research activities, technology engineering development and laboratory testing in the oil and gas field. Manuscripts in English are accepted from ...