Wilhelmsen’s latest rope technology reduces snap-back risk

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(LYSAKER, Norway) — Despite the industry’s best intentions, such as designating hazardous snap-back zones on mooring decks, or the drawing up of detailed line management and mooring plans, mooring remains a high-risk task. Serious, often fatal, accidents continue to happen with regularity, with seemingly no end in sight. Until now.

Proving impossible to accurately calculate or predict just how fiber ropes will behave when they fail and snap, Wilhelmsen Ships Service has instead developed a unique solution which dramatically reduces a rope’s recoil, or snap-back potential.

The Snap Back Arrestor (SBA) is an energy-absorbing core that sits within the company’s Timm Master 12-strand plaited, mixed polymer rope. With the appearance of a rope, held within the heart of a 12-strand mooring line, if the outer, load-bearing construction breaks, the SBA absorbs the snap-back forces, transforming them from a potentially deadly snap to a much safer slump.

In development for close to seven years, the Timm Snap Back Arrestor is the result of a laborious process of trial and error, with 25 different variants of the system put through their paces in more than 120 different tests. Finally identifying a viable alternative in early 2016, DNV GL verified Wilhelmsen’s SBA solution in May 2016. Since then the Timm Master 12 SBA has been exhaustively tested, passing both TCLL testing and OCIMF MEG4 tests, in both dry and wet conditions.

Tried, tested and recently type-approved by DNV GL, the Timm Master 12 SBA is produced according to ISO 9554:2010 and ISO 10556:2009 and tested according to ISO 2307:2010. It has also been tested according to the latest edition of the OCIMF Mooring Equipment Guidelines.

The Snap Back Arrestor technology used in the Timm Master 12 will be rolled out across Timm’s entire 12-strand range.

For more information, visit www.wilhelmsen.com.

By Professional Mariner Staff