Huisman introduces revolutionary Fiber Rope System for Ultra Deepwater Applications

Cees van Veluw, Huisman’s Product Manager Cranes says: “We strongly believe in the future of cranes with fiber rope included – not just because of a CAPEX and OPEX evaluation, but also to further shift the limit of what can be deployed in subsea applications. Our extensive R&D programme, which has been active for over 10 years, has shown that the fiber rope with the best lifetime performance would require some serious active cooling of the fiber rope on the crane when performing Active Heave Compensation. However, the actual thermal behaviour of fiber ropes in AHC have proven to be unreliable to predict and hard to measure. On top of that, having the active cooling system of the fiber rope as an essential part of the crane’s safety system is not the way we see robust and reliable crane design.”

Proper spooling of the sensitive fiber rope is done by Huisman’s well-known Traction Winch and Storage Winch setup, while Active Heave Compensation is done with a steel wire rope on a direct winch. The system is available in various capacities. For traditional knuckle boom cranes, a 120mt and 200mt version is available, while the recently introduced Hybrid Boom Crane can be delivered with larger capacities of 400mt and 600mt. This can provide a significant step change in subsea deployment capabilities, as the full load is available at all depths. This way deployment up to 600mt is now possible at depths of 4,000m and beyond.

Huisman will be presenting its revolutionary innovation at the 2017 International WorkBoat Show in New Orleans.