The wind propulsion company bound4blue placed two eSAILs on the Amasus-owned Eems Traveller, a 2,850 deadweight tonnage (DWT) general cargo vessel.
The eSAIL suction sail system depends on the utilisation of a thick aerodynamic profile and smart suction to boost propulsive efficiency, resulting in a system that produces seven times the lift of an airplane wing.
These sails are supposed to represent a newer and improved version of the system originally placed on the La Naumon vessel.
With a total height of 17 metres, they are still the biggest suction sails ever built and installed on a ship.
The installation was carried out in two stages. The foundations for the eSAILs® were produced and installed in the Netherlands one year ago, during a scheduled regular dry-dock of the vessel.
Last week, the verticalisation manoeuvre and connection to the sail reinforcement were completed in less than four hours at the Port of Bilbao. Between these two phases, bound4blue has been monitoring the ship to establish a baseline performance that will be utilised by a third party to evaluate the fuel and pollution reductions over the following year.
Thus, scientifically confirmed data are acquired, which may be utilised to illustrate the real impacts of the system in operation on board the vessel and serve as the foundation for future research.
“In the same way that we need proven sustainable solutions to decarbonize the industry, we also need to implement them as fast and efficiently as possible. As evidence of this, we have utilized for the first time the port infrastructure to install our systems, demonstrating that shipowners don’t have to wait for the scheduled maintenance of the ship to start reaping the benefits of wind propulsion,” stated José Miguel Bermúdez, CEO of bound4blue.
