Real-Time Engine Oil Quality Monitoring is Now in Reach

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Published Sep 18, 2025 6:24 PM by The Maritime Executive

 

 

Lube oil contamination is one of the fastest ways to get into trouble in the engine room, and engineers monitor their oil closely for signs of problems. But it's hard to catch everything without a lab on board - at least, until recently. Castrol has come up with a new solution, SmartMonitor, that regularly checks the oil's properties and lets the crew (and shore staff) know about any developing issues. To find out more, TME caught up with Castrol Technical Service Manager, Are Sletten, who has been working with the product throughout early trials. 

 

Just for background, what's the standard process for analyzing engine oil?

 

What happens normally on board the vessel is that an engineer takes a physical oil sample in a bottle and repeats the process once every three months. They will ship it to the laboratory. It takes two to three weeks before you get a reply, because it takes time for shipping and there is processing time at the lab. And then it will be checked and the results will be sent. 

 

How does Castrol's new equipment do it differently?

 

The SmartMonitor unit will give you the same information as a lab report, but every hour. It will automatically take a sample from the main engine, run it through the unit, and then drain it back into the engine. 

 

SmartMonitor will give you the total base number, viscosity, oxidation, and water content, when used in an engine application. There is a display on the unit that the engineer can have a look at to see if everything is okay, but the unit also feeds data up to the cloud, and then the customers on shore can go into our website and view the results. They have access to the graphs, the trends, the alarm limits, and all of that. So, if you want to go back and see if something happened last week, you could go back and see the trend. 

 

What can this help prevent? How does it save the operator money?

 

It's sort of like insurance: you might not need it, but in the event you do, then it will more than pay for itself. First, if you detect any water early, that's very valuable because of the damage that water ingress can do to an engine. The second most important factor is viscosity, especially when customers are considering new fuels. Fuel oil is always affecting the lube oil in the engine. In this time when people are testing biofuels, ammonia and methanol, having this on board is a valuable way to make sure that the fuel is not causing problems.

 

For example, if there is a little bit of methanol fuel getting into the engine oil, the viscosity will go down, and then you lose your lubrication. If you lose the lubrication film, you might end up with bearing damage. This unit will tell you instantly if viscosity is going down and of course it has a low-level alarm to alert the engineers. At the same time, company managers on shore can get the alert via email or on the phone as a text message.  

 

Even if you're not paying attention, it's watching the engine every hour. It's a huge help for inexperienced engineers, and it takes a bit of stress off for senior engineers as well. 

 

Do you have any early success stories? 

 

We have done trials for several years and we have prevented engine damage. With one customer, the unit gave an alert that there was water in the engine oil. The engineers thought it was a faulty sensor and believed the unit was wrong, but we asked them to check anyways. They found that there was water in the oil, and because our SmartMonitor caught it early, they were able to fix the problem at lower cost. The customer then bought several more of our SmartMonitor units for their other vessels.

-TME

ClassNK to Enhance the Safety and Loading Capacity of Container Ships

Published Sep 24, 2025 8:05 AM by The Maritime Executive

 

[By: ClassNK]

ClassNK has released new guidelines for those involved in container shipping, aiming to enhance the efficiency of container stowage while ensuring safety measures  such as preventing cargo collapse. These guidelines apply the latest expertise in weather forecasting, ship motion, and digital twin technologies.

The newly released 'Guidelines for the Safety of Maritime Cargo Based on Weather Forecasts,' 'Guidelines for Anti-Rolling Devices,' and 'Guidelines for Container Stowage and Securing Arrangements (Edition 3.3)' enable safer and higher-capacity container shipping by optimizing stowage based on weather forecasts for short-term voyages, and by taking advantage of the roll reduction effects of anti-rolling devices.

The details of each guideline are as follows: 

'Guidelines for the Safety of Maritime Cargo Based on Weather Forecasts'
Route selection based on metocean information is one of the key factors in the safe transportation of cargo. Although weather forecasts are a valuable source of information when the forecast period is sufficiently short, it is necessary to take their uncertainties into account to ensure safety. However, there have been no specific standards until now, and each company has handled it individually.

By clarifying the correlations between the AIS records accumulated by ClassNK, over one million cases of past metocean data, and actual sea conditions through big data analysis, this guideline specifies new technical requirements for uncertainty qualification of weather forecast values and safety assessments of cargo, and describes corresponding standard evaluation methods. In addition, this guideline also specifies a calculation method for a load correction factor based on weather forecasts for short-term voyages, related to container loading and lashing strength assessments for container carriers.
By applying this guideline, safe and optimized stowage operations can be achieved in short-term voyages based on weather forecasts.

'Guidelines for Anti-Rolling Devices'
Anti-rolling devices such as anti-rolling tanks have been increasingly installed on cargo ships in recent years for the purpose of improving safety, comfort, and work efficiency by reducing ship rolling. With growing concerns about cargo collapse accidents, attention to anti-rolling tanks has increased. While their installation on large merchant ships has started to spread, there have been no common safety standards so far.

This guideline specifies technical and inspection requirements for anti-rolling devices installed on ships, making use of the expertise on ship motions gained during the development of the 'Guidelines for Parametric Roll Countermeasures,' and sets out a method for evaluating the effect of anti-rolling tanks on reducing roll motion. 
By applying this guideline, safe container stowage operations considering the roll reduction effects of anti-rolling devices can be realized.

'Guidelines for Container Stowage and Securing Arrangements' (Revised)
The 'Guidelines for Container Stowage and Securing Arrangements (Edition 3.0),' released in 2023, has contributed to balancing safety and economic efficiency by enabling optimized stowage operations that take into account the effects of routes and seasons, in response to the enlargement of container ships and advances in lashing technology.

With the release of the guidelines on weather forecasts and anti-rolling devices, the related requirements have now been revised to enable container stowage that also reflects these factors.
The guidelines are available for download via "Guidelines" of My Page on ClassNK’s website after registration: https://www.classnk.or.jp/account/en/Rules_Guidance/ssl/guidelines.aspx

ClassNK will continue to contribute to achieving safe and efficient shipping under various operating conditions through the guidelines and other initiatives.

The products and services herein described in this press release are not endorsed by The Maritime Executive.