This week is the triannual WODCON conference1. This edition will be held in lovely Copenhagen, in itself already a reason to be there. But there is more, the program is packed with interesting items. Starting with the opening ceremony with the Danish minister of transport and the Corporate Executives Discussion on sustainability. The Fehmarnbelt Tunnel Link will be a hot topic all through the program. My personal suggestion would be to attend Session 4: ‘Hydraulic Transport’ on Tuesday 17. Two of my highly regarded colleagues will be presenting their work on very interesting topics.
Rick Bekkers has been involved in the development of our new ProDredge edition. It is a slurry transport estimation tool. Where Ewout van Duursen has been working tirelessly on programming the tool, Rick has been checking the models and the results against known literature. He will show you the new reports generated and the insights they will give you for evaluating a proposed dredging system.
Suman Sapkota will be presenting his favourite topic: ‘Erosion estimation on the impeller blades of centrifugal dredge pumps’. He has been working on this topic ever since his own graduation project.2 Over the years he spend pondering over this issue and gradually grew in experience with the problem. Based on his ideas, he managed to start a cooperation with the Delft University of Technology and have a master student working on the practical details of his plans. Previously, I’ve written about the graduation of Wim Kleermaker in another article.3
Suman has been concentrating on gathering the various models for wear under different conditions during his own graduation. The results from his simulations could only be checked against my own experience with badly worn impellers and disasters. Immediately introducing observer bias and survivor bias. So, for this project Suman really wanted to include experiments to have at least one observation to match the simulations.
And what a struggle it was, to get the experiments done. Wim really gained more experience in fixing troubles than in fact finding. In the end he managed. After operating for a couple of weeks under heavy load conditions for the dredge pump, the impeller showed a noticeable wear pattern. And they came up with an innovative way of measuring the erosion pattern and match the test results with the simulation results.
The paper Suman is going to present on the WODCON, condenses the results from Wim together with Suman’s previous work as a graduation student himself. Don’t get deterred by the in depth analysis. If you fancy, you can follow the comprehensive literature references and understand his model. Or, just enjoy the ride and inspect the interesting pictures with the conclusions at the end. If you are really interested in his work, just approach him in the break hours, he is very willing to share his experience with you.
If you can’t find him, or Rick. Drop by at our booth #27 in the lobby.4 There will always be someone to get you into contact.
References
- WODCON 2022, WODA
- Graduation Suman Sapkota: Where Wear Parts Were Worn Down, Discover Dredging
- Graduation Of Wim Kleermaker: Measuring And Predicting Wear In Impellers
- WODCON Dredging Conference, Saskia den Herder