Princess Cruises specifies common rail engines for newbuilding at Fincantieri

An agreement was reached between Princess Cruises, the engine builder Wärtsilä and the shipyard Fincantieri that the latest newbuilding, hull 6100, will be equipped with Wärtsilä?s common rail engines. The engine configuration is four 12-cylinder engines and two 8-cylinder engines, all of the Wärtsilä 46 type in diesel-electric configuration, giving the ship a total installed power of 67.2 MW.

Hull 6100 is a modified version of the Caribbean Princess class ships built at Fincantieri. The passenger capacity is 3100. The first newbuilding with common rail engines, the Coral Princess, has now been in operation for one and a half year, and the engines have passed 10,000 hours of operation. The sister ship, Island Princess, has more than 5,000 hours of operation.

Since the first common rail engines were delivered, the technology has been developed for still lower smoke values on the ?filter smoke number? scale (FSN). The new engines will have a FSN of < 0.1 on normal heavy fuel and below 0.2 on high-ash fuels, where the visibility limit is around 0.3. A further advantage is lower total fuel consumption at all loads. A new method of NOx reduction is being developed, i.e. the combustion air saturation, and it will be available for later installations, if needed. The engines are in original version compliant with the Marpol Annex VI NOx curve and an EIAPP certificate is provided.