An Innovative Electric Ship Steering Systems: Analysis and Implementation

Ship's steering systems have changed over the ages, driven by the need for more powerful and reliable systems. Nowadays the normal practice for ship's steering systems lies into hydraulic solutions because of their excellent characteristics in terms of performances and reliability. However, the modern advancements in the electric drives field, give insights to compare the two systems, with attention to the lower masses and costs enabled by electric drives adoption. This paper describes this comparison, downstream to the conceptual design purpose of an electric drive system suited for ships of about 500 tons of load displacement and 50 m of overall length. The results confirm the hypothesis, laying the foundations for the development of ship's steering systems inspired by this studied solution.