Modelling, estimation and control of a Fresh-Water-Cooling system on cruising ships

A Fresh-Water-Cooling circuit is investigated, which is commonly used on ships for recovering the waste-heat from the diesel engine. The excess heat during operation is stored in the coolant, which in turn is used as the primary fluid in a heat exchanger for pre-heating the seawater feed. A dynamic model of the system is derived from first principles and a given scheme of the cooling circuit. A Conditionally-Gaussian-Filter is applied to identify the unknown drifting parameters of the heat exchanger and the outlet temperature. Based on the estimation result of the filter, the outlet temperature is stabilized to a reference value using a nonlinear control law.