World Record of Barge Launched from Deck of Mother Barge
World Record of Barge Launching from Deck of Mother Barge
Ship launching with marine airbags is found to be versatile and flexible in marine industry nowdays. Marine Airbags can roll while carring heavy load act as pneumatic rollers.Rubber airbags save not only time and investment for the shipbuilding companies, they require less of the ground conditions.That is why ship balloons are playing an important roll in the vessel launching fields.
People usually launched vessels from dirt, beach, floor,gravel ramp with marine airbags, but have you ever seen to launch a barge from deck of aother barge?
In September 2014, the engineering team of Evergreen Maritime worked together with Indonesia PMG shipyards, successfully launched one 230 feet barge from deck of another 300 floating barge with Evergreen rubber balloons.
The barge to be launched measured 230 feet in length with width of 64 feet, 14 feet in width located on the deck of its mother's barge whose length measured 300 feet, 64 feet in width and 20 feet by depth. Those two barges were all constructed by NanTong Yahua shipbuilding corporation, completed at the same time. With Evergreen Maritime ship launching airbags, the 300 feet barge entered into water first, the 230 barge was loaded into it with 1200 Tons floating crane. Then two barges were towed to Indonesia Tarakan.
It is known that to roll a vessel into water from another floating vessel is a project full of higher risk especially when the two barges have close dimensions. The key points is once the 230'barge floats at stern, its bow may drop down and collide with the increasing bow of 300'barge.After more and more considerations, our enineering team finally worked out a detailed launching plan to challenge this project.
On 3rd September, our engineers arrived at Tarakan site. The ballasting operation totally took 4 days of work,and we spent another two days to remove keel blocks. At noon of 10th September, the final launch approached. With the holding wire ropes cut off, the 230' barge moved with rolling marine airbags,solwly and safely passed over the mother barge' bow, entered into the sea without any big splash.