Depth sensor – Discover Dredging

Never waste a moment to tell a good story. Usually, you’ll find informative or educational stories on this platform. This time, I literally found an opportunity to tell you a fun story. All it took, was this nifty little classic navigational instrument. The crew on the dredge used to calibrate their modern survey system1 or checked the delivered depth with this ancient tool. Ever seen one like this? It is a depth sounding lead2. Well, I doubt this one was made from lead, based on the estimated weight and appearance, but it does have all the other characteristics of a normal depth sounding lead.

Evolving from a stone on a rope, the depth sounding lead was used to sound the depth. The plummet was made from lead. The rope was marked at regular intervals according to the shoe size of the current king. Cast overboard, the lead sank and keeping the rope tight, the depth at that location could be read from the markings on the vertical rope. It involved some nimble dexterity to stand at the lee side of a fast moving vessel in a choppy sea to handle the lead, a bundle of coiling rope and accurately reading the depth at the right moment. Hands down to all those seafarers that explored the world in old times and managed to navigate the globe on this instrument.

Sounding the depth manually with rope and lead (Credit: Wikipedia)

The depth was not the only information gained from this action. When you look closely, there is a hole at the bottom of the lead. On the picture above it is empty, but it ought to be filled with grease or wax. When the lead touched the bottom, some of the dirt was caught in the grease. When the lead was retrieved, the cling-ons were inspected. These could be either: sand, mud, gravel, peat, silt or even shells and other biological detritus. The material was reported on the charts also. This made navigation in charted waters easy: compare the sample with the indicated bottom condition. And that brings me to my fun story.

Before the Dutch reclaimed their land, there was a large water body in the Netherlands, called the ‘Zuiderzee’3. Or, South Sea as opposed to the North Sea, which most of you might know. This Zuiderzee, was extensively used for fishing. The skippers did not have charts, but they relied on oral tradition handed down through the ages of where what kind of soil would be available. Near Urk, you might find rocks. Near Pampus, there will be a lot of mud and around Stavoren, there is the famous ‘Vrouwenzand’ (Sand Bank of the Lady of Stavoren4). So, when the fishermen cast their depth sounding leads out, they knew the location of their vessel and the depth beneath it.

Map of the ‘Zuiderzee’ (Credit: Wikipedia)

One of those skippers boasted he did not even have to see and feel the sample, but just by tasting it, he could pinpoint his location within a hundred yards. Hard to believe, right? The cabin boy on board thought likewise. So, he devised a cunning plan. After lunch, the skipper went down to the cabin for a short nap and instructed the cabin boy to bring him the lead to taste the sample. But, our clever cabin boy sank the lead in the crate with potato’s. The bottom of the crate was covered with clay from the potato’s. Carefully bringing the sample to the skipper, the cabin boy woke him up and awaited his reaction. The skipper woke up groggily and grappled for the lead with half closed eyes. He stuck his finger in the sample hole and tasted the material inside. Suddenly, his eyes went wide open and he exclaimed: Oh, disaster! The dikes have broken again! The land is flooded and we are sailing over farmer John’s potato patch!

You never know what you dredge from the bottom of a potato crate

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One of the first commissioning jobs I had to do for my previous employer, was on the dredge ‘Sylvia’, as she refused to work on Monday morning. And no one knew why. She was purchased by the TIWAG, as they recognised that power dams are a blocking the natural sediment transport and could potentially damage the turbines in the power dam1. To prevent anything serious happening, the power dams were fitted with ‘silt traps’. TIWAG ordered a dredge to clean up the silt trap and make some money on the excavated sand, classified by a dewatering bucket wheel on shore2.

Overview of the TIWAG dredge ‘Sylvia’ and dewatering bucket wheel at Kufstein

At a power dam you would expect, that electric power wouldn’t be a problem. Well, those power dams generate power, but they don’t like to let you plug in your dredge. So, ‘Sylvia’ had to have her own power generation with a diesel engine. As power dams are usually high in the mountains, the dredge pump should preferably be placed on the ladder. The natural setup would then be an electric drive. On ‘Sylvia’ the classic and reliable electric shaft principle was chosen. The diesel engine speed is transferred to the dredge pump by the variable frequency. Depending on the generator speed, the field coil is excitated according to a controller, that can act as some sort of electrical clutch.

Explanation of the electric shaft arrangement on dredge ‘Sylvia’

One thing to be aware of with an electric shaft, is the starting current of the electric motor. The electrical engineer that designed the system just worked with the nominal operating point. I wasn’t involved in the choices, but nowadays I will warn people to about this misconception.

If the pump is started on an empty pipe, even with a moderate speed, the dredge pump receives no resistance and the capacity through the pump increases enormously. The power requirements increase to a level above the nominal operating point! After several blown fuses and an incinerated generator the system was slightly modified. Also, to restrict the power surge, a discharge valve was installed to ramp up against. At zero capacity, the pump requires virtually no power.

Start-up procedures plotted in pump curves

The difficulty with ‘Sylvia’, was, that there was no possibility to hook up the discharge valve to the hydraulic system. Instead, the valve was connected to the working air compressor. It primarily served as an air source for the bubble point to measure the operating depth of the dredge wheel.

Retrofitting a pneumatic operated gate valve to the pneumatic system on board

After installation, this worked fine. No blown fuses anymore. Should be fine. Until next Monday morning. Fuses tripping at every start-up. Only after several hours she would run normally. It turned out, the gate did not close completely under pressure. It required the full pneumatic operating pressure to close all the way down.

Aha! As the compressed air vessel was leaking air through the bubble point on the ladder over the weekend, there was not enough pressure to close the gate valve completely. As the mixture only needs a small opening to already draw a lot of capacity, the fuses tripped every Monday morning. Once the compressor was able to top off the vessel later in the morning, the gate valve did close completely and the dredge pump could start. A simple ball valve to close the bubble point remedied the leak and no more problems on that system again.

Tag: Depth sensor

Modern Uses And Legendary Excuses For Manual Depth Sounding

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The Dredge That Refused to Work on Monday Morning

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