Revived Ball Joint Design Delivered to Van Oord

Dredge Yard has successfully delivered to Van Oord several heavy duty dredge ball joints for the use on discharge pipe of 1000 mm diameter. These dredge ball joints will be used in the Gulf region, which is experiencing exponential growth in infrastructure projects and marine structures.

Dredge Yard, with its ability to provide solutions for the engineering problems, has been continuously working over the past years on the design of the dredge ball joint with its dedicated team of engineers.

A number of design improvements, calculations, FEA stress analysis, and CFD simulations, have resulted into an energy efficient, safe, robust and environmentally friendly dredge ball joint.

Dredge Yard revived one of the past designs which was not given high importance as no serious CFD studies and research were done at that time. This concept consists of a concave liner instead of the conventional straight pipe in the ball all in order to lower resistance in the flow while tilting.

The CFD simulation comparing the concave liner ball joint and straight pipe ball joint has confirmed that there is less pressure drop using the concave joint.

The following conclusions were made after results:

• The concave liner ball joint in tilted position has 67% less pressure drop than the straight pipe ball joint in tilted position;
• This pressure distribution is aligned with the velocity;
• Corner vertices are seen due to sudden change in area of flow while tilting.

This CFD simulation shows that there will be less flow resistance, less pressure drop and load on the pump, increasing productivity and resulting in less power consumption.

“This project was challenging. Firstly, it was new design. Second, it had a very challenging delivery time. But with our dedicated team, we produced and delivered them on time. Van Oord’s representatives participated in the quality inspection as well for the dynamic test, for a high pressure of over 30 bars. The results were very satisfying.” said Operations Manager, Michel Debo.

Beside this, Dredge Yard Makina is preparing to carry out another dynamic test for a different project, the heavy duty ball joint 900 which is needed by a customer based in the Middle East.

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Press Release, October 14, 2014