A motor ship is a ship propulsed by a motor, which in this context means an internal combustion engine. Nowadays this is usually a diesel engine. The name of motor ships are often prefixed with MS or M/S. A motor is a device that converts energy into mechanical power, and is often synonymous with engine. ... It has been suggested that Car engine be merged into this article or section. ... The diesel engine is a type of internal combustion engine; more specifically, it is a compression ignition engine, in which the fuel is ignited by being suddenly exposed to the high temperature and pressure of a compressed gas, rather than by a separate source of ignition, such as a spark...
The work on the five-month-old diesel-electric cruise ship Rhapsody of the Seas cured a problem which had plagued the ship since it left the builder's yard.
More technicians boarded the ship and the vessel sailed one voyage with reduced speed on a shortened itinerary while additional patch-up work was done.
He pointed out that diesel-electric propulsion and electric motors are common features of cruise ships and have proved to be highly reliable.
As a bonus, the motor's efficiency also goes up by 1 or 2 percent, depending on the load--an improvement that in a high-power application like ship propulsion means hundreds of thousands of dollars in fuel savings over the course of a year for a typical cargo ship.
The primary contractor for both superconductor motors is American Superconductor Corp., in Westborough, Mass., the maker of the superconductor wire at the heart of the motors.
In a big conventional motor, these coils are usually copper; in a superconducting motor, the rotor coils are made of a high-temperature superconductor and the stator coils are copper.