This week, Royal IHC won an Excellent Paper Award at the Technical Forum of CHIDA, which took place on December 14 and 15 in Shenzhen.
The paper is titled ‘Developments for sustainable dredging equipment’.
Sustainability is an important driver for product developments within IHC, with focus on exhaust gas emission reduction, lowering fuel consumption and reducing turbidity.
In order to become sustainable, the environmental footprint of equipment needs to be minimized. In practice this means minimizing harmful exhaust gas emissions, minimizing turbidity and minimizing sound emissions both above water and under water. It also means a continuous focus on increasing the efficiency of equipment and dredging operations.
The paper describes a number of sustainable product developments, such as LNG hoppers that have significantly lower exhaust gas emissions and the Plumigator overflow, which contributes to turbidity reduction.
Also developments to improve fuel efficiency are mentioned, such as hull shape optimization and IHC Eco dredging automation that increases the efficiency of dredging processes.