Case Study: MAN B&W Diesel achieves rapid development of the world’s fastest-selling L21/31 marine engine with PTC Mathcad (PTC)

MAN B&W Diesel - Customer Case Study

MAN B&W Diesel, a global leader in marine diesel engines, faced the challenge of rapidly developing a precise, reliable medium-weight engine (the L21/31) while ensuring calculations and design rationale were transparent and easy to share across departments. Engineers had previously relied on FORTRAN and Excel, which made it difficult for non-programmers to follow design steps, so they adopted PTC Mathcad from vendor PTC to support the project’s complex engineering calculations.

PTC supplied PTC Mathcad, which linked live mathematical calculations to sketches and documentation, enabling verification of critical A-components and B-components and improving cross-team communication and early error detection. Using PTC Mathcad, MAN B&W Diesel completed the L21/31 in under two years; the engine became the world’s fastest-selling medium-weight marine engine and logged more than 10,000 hours on the Princess of Scandinavia, with project reports retained for future designs.

MAN B&W Diesel

Udo Peterson

Design Engineer