Winners! Heavy Lift Awards 2024 for Excellence in Engineering
Vanguard announced as winners of the Excellence in Engineering Award at the 2024 the Heavy Lift Awards
We were shortlisted in the category for our up-righting of the ‘Europa Vessel Project’, which saw us engineer and deliver a bespoke lifting solution to upright the vessel, which had slipped during a period of maintenance in Cape Town.
Congratulations to all the team involved in this project and to all the other winners and nominees!
The winning project involved a complex lifting operation to upright a bark rigged sailing vessel, named the Europa, at the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront Dock Yard in Cape Town. The vessel, which had been undergoing maintenance, slipped from the keel supports and rolled onto its starboard side. Vanguard was subcontracted by Resolve Marine to engineer and perform an up-righting operation to realign the vessel with the center line of the track system.
The vessel, which weighed 650ton and measured 44.5m in length and 7.45m in width was lying at approximately 38° to starboard, it had shifted approximately 1.2m off center of the keel dollies. Vanguard engineered a solution utilising four 186ton hydraulic strand jacks and four independent hydraulic gantry systems (8 hydraulic legs). Four heavy duty header beams were used to support the stand jacks and were installed between the gantries and positioned over the vessel and between the masts so as to minimise any further impact to the masts and rigging.
The strand jack system, which was rigged to keel brackets that had been custom fabricated for the operation, provided a high degree of accuracy and enabled the Vanguard team to lift and upright the vessel in a controlled and precise manner, using a series of controlled lifts and movements.
Once the vertical lift had been completed, Vanguard successfully completed a transverse skidding operation to realign the 650ton vessel with the track system.
Click here to find out more about the Europa project.