SPECIALIST marine engine supplier James Troop & Co has completed a full engine and IPS (Inboard Propulsion System) service, the first UK work of its kind on a windfarm support vessel, as Bob Troop, Chairman and Managing Director explains.
The contract for windfarm crew transfer company Njord Offshore involved taking the year-old catamaran Njord Freyr out of the water for the first time at a Wirral slipway for a 1,500 hours’ service of the underwater parts of the vessel’s Inboard Propulsion System (IPS).
Njord Freyr is a highly-specialist 115 tonne vessel and one of a class of four built in Singapore; she has a length of 26m, a beam of 9m and a top speed of 28 knots.
The work included servicing the Njord Freyr’s ‘quad installation’ of 4 Volvo Penta D13-IPS 900 engines and transmissions. James Troop’s Engineers worked long shifts on the Saturday and Sunday to enable the vessel to be refloated Sunday evening.
This was a crucial part of the contract with Njord Offshore to ensure the vessel was back on station at her Barrow-in-Furness base ready for the company’s next scheduled windfarm support sailings in the northern Irish Sea.
The work was overseen by Alan Railton, Troop’s Technical Manager and Andrew Thwaites, Njord Offshore’s Marine Superintendent. This is the first time that this type of service has been carried out over a weekend to maximize the vessel’s uptime and required a very carefully planned operation.
The three Troop engineers who carried out the work have all qualified to work on the high technology Volvo Penta IPS Driveline system through training at the Volvo Penta Training Centre in Warwick.
Bob Troop said: “We feel very honoured to be the first company in the UK to carry out this work, after being given this opportunity in a highly competitive market place.
“We are very active in the windfarm support vessel market and we are authorized service dealers not only for Volvo Penta engines, but also for MTU and MAN. We are pleased to see that business has improved in the windfarm market after some quiet years. Although we are based on Merseyside, we are also active all around the country, especially in other windfarm bases at Barrow and Grimsby.”
The contract secured top marks from Njord Offshore in the customer survey and as a direct result of the success of the Njord Freyr project, James Troop were awarded a further contract to carry out the 6,000 hour QL3 overhauls on four MTU V8 2000 series engines at their workshops in Runcorn.