You might have read the CEDA Industry News1 publication of September and the LinkedIn announcement2. Or, have been present at Session 10, The Story of Safety3 of the CEDA Dredging Days 2024, where I initially recounted my story of misfortune. For the uninitiated, I’ll shortly recount it over here, although the focus will be more on the design problem back than.
When I was fresh out of university, working for my previous employer, I was assigned to advise during the commissioning of a bucket wheel dredge in Austria. Here at my website, I’ve already mentioned a very peculiar problem we had with starting the dredge on Monday morning4. The whole dredge was a funny contraption, trying to fulfil the specific requirements set by the customer. The task of the dredge was to clean out the sediment caught in a silt trap5 in front of a power dam to prevent the material flushing through the delicate turbines. Furthermore, the fine sediment should be removed from the system to be sold for beneficial use, but the larger boulders that came along should be rejected from the system. Unless they were very large and stay in place for forming the liner of the silt trap.
The proposed method was to use a bucket wheel to gobble up the larger stones, but leave the even bigger ones down at the pit floor. Additional advantage of the bucket wheel is that they tend to have a very low resuspension rate which is beneficial for reducing the turbidity in the river and save the dam turbines. However, the larger stones taken by the bucket wheel will not pass the dredge pump. A proven solution to filter out stones for the dredge pump is a so called stone collection box. They come in various executions, but this one was a large cylindrical vessel with a cover on top. Inside was a cage that connected to the inlet and outlet of the vessel. When the cage was filled, the lid was lifted by the crane and the attached cage came out. The cage was swung over to a barge alongside and the stones were unloaded through a trap door. Sounds straightforward, right?
The thing is, when you have anything in the suction pipe section, it will create a pressure loss and the pressure in front of the dredge pump becomes lower. Or higher vacuum, as you wish. This is already a problem for an inboard pump when you are working at sea level, even more so when working at altitude. The NPSHr is easily reached. In order to have enough NPSHa, even when the stone collecting box was filling up, it was decided to have a submerged dredge pump for increasing the pre-pressure. Consequently, the stone collecting box would also be placed on the ladder, in front of the dredge pump.
All in itself no problem. The disadvantage is that a submerged stone collecting box should be very strong, big and heavy to withstand the under pressure, although there is very little room around the ladder, the ladder itself becomes quite heavy and bulky and the submerged frontal area increased dramatically, increasing the total drag of the dredge in the fast flowing river current. To mitigate this, the ladder winch, the service crane and the 25 ton forward wire winch were all stacked over each other, so each could do it’s job independently. Although none of us ever did a collision check in the design phase of the dredge. In actual operation, they all were in each others way. When lifting the cover of the stone collecting box, it got caught by the forward wire. When lifting it further, it slipped of the side by the strong drag forces on the wire. I was to first to experience our negligence and got hit on my head when I was to eager to inspect the contents of the box. I blacked out, fell in the frigid water in the ladder well and woke up washed up on the ladder. My colleagues rushed me to the hospital, where I ended up between all sorts of winter sports injuries. Fortunately for me, I am able to recount my story and share it here and through the CEDA Industry News.
References
- Dredging safety under the spotlight, CEDA
- Safety is paramount, CEDA
- Welcome to CEDA’s (revamped) Dredging Days 2024
- The Dredge That Refused to Work on Monday Morning
- A Reservoir of Dredging Opportunities