Shiprepair & Maintenance: 3rd Quarter 2019
In one of its biggest contracts this year, Damen Shiprepair Amsterdam has completed an extensive package of work to the 10-year-old, 156m long Dive Support Vessel (DSV) Deep Arctic for TechnipFMC. According to Damen, this was an “exceptionally complex” project, as a result of the large number of individual jobs that were required and the number of different stakeholders involved.
The works, lasting seven weeks, mainly related to the ship’s intermediate class renewal docking and general maintenance, including the renewal of the steel plates to its box coolers. To achieve this, the yard removed 31 separate box coolers from the forward, midship and aft sea chests. The preparations needed to accomplish this involved the disconnection of all the associated piping on both the coolers and the anodes, the removal of associated deck plates and benches, and the installation of lifting pad eyes above the box coolers, where required.
Once all the overhauls and inspections were completed and the coolers returned, the yard reinstalled them all. It then renewed the box cooler steel plates, cropping the old sea chest plates and replacing them with new ones prefabricated in the Amsterdam yard’s steel workshop and machine shop. Thereafter, all the interior areas affected, including the ballast water tanks, forward tanks, coffer dam tanks and hull plates, were treated, and the yard also blasted and painted all the repaired sea chests and 16 additional forward sea chests.
While Deep Arctic was in the Amsterdam yard’s drydock, Damen carried out a complete overhaul of its six thrusters. The propeller shaft and centre line rudder also went through 10-year overhaul. Additional associated works included the fabrication of new piping for both tunnel thrusters, renewal of the lower gear units, repairs to the rudder stock actuator and the overhaul of the stern tube seal boxes.
A highlight of 2019, so far, for Damen Shiprepair Rotterdam was the visit of the wind turbine installation jack-up vessel MPI Resolution, which spent around eight weeks at the yard undergoing a repair and rebranding programme. Following the acquisition in 2018 of the vessel’s owner, MPI Offshore by Van Oord, the repair works provided the opportunity to remove the original red and white paint scheme using ultra-high-pressure water jets and to repaint the vessel in the blue, orange and white livery of Van Oord.
The 130m by 38m MPI Resolution went into drydock primarily for the overhaul of its thrusters and steel repairs to the hull. The four azimuth thrusters and three tunnel thrusters were all disassembled, checked, cleaned and reinstalled. At the same time, the six legs and the inner surfaces of the leg wells underwent repairs, cleaning and blasting before receiving new coatings. With only two entrances at deck level to the leg wells, this was a challenging job, Damen points out. Four of the ballast tanks also received similar treatment, with gaining access to the ballast tanks requiring the creation of eight separate openings in the hull. A range of other minor repairs and maintenance jobs took place at the same time.
