Australian shipyard Austal recently delivered two 69-metre vehicle-passenger catamaran ferries, 'Jazan' and 'Farasan', to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Each vessel is equipped with four MTU 4000 M73L engines, rated 2,880kW at 2,050rpm, and each driving Rolls-Royce Kamewa waterjets through non-reversing, horizontal transmissions type ZF 9050 NR2H.
The transmissions, designed and manufactured by ZF Marine in Friedrichshafen, Germany, are based on the new 9000 series which comprises many models, including vertical offset, down-angle and vee-drive for fast craft application, as well as deep ratio models for installation in work boats and even a special model with the input shaft arranged above the output.
The parallel shaft, horizontal transmissions, ZF 9050 NR2H are "handed" to permit the most compact propulsion arrangement with twin engines arranged fore and aft in each hull of the catamaran. Designed to meet Germanischer Lloyd's rules, the transmission has a continuous power input capacity of 1.466 kW/rpm yet weighs only 1,130 kg.
ZF Marine's relationship with Austal goes back many years. ZF transmissions were fitted in the very first vessel built by Austal, a 30-metre dive catamaran delivered in 1989. Since then, Austal has built 72 vessels fitted with 168 ZF Marine transmissions, comprising catamarans, monohulls and trimarans from 20 to 113 metres in length with operating speeds between14 and 43 knots.
In addition, Austal currently has orders for a further 15 vessels with a total of 37 ZF Marine transmissions, one of which will be the 200th ZF Marine transmission delivered to Austal. These orders include four type ZF 60000 NR2H gearboxes to be installed in the first joint high speed vessel, a 103-metre catamaran which Austal has been contracted to design and build for the US Department of Defense.
