PRODUCT
COATINGS & CORROSION CONTROL
Corrosion Never Sleeps
Muehlhan Group, for more than 125 years, has been a professional provider for surface protection services; the company rooted in the maritime shipbuilding and repair business and long ago expanding its activities into the offshore and industrial markets. The Muehlhan Group has been in existence since 1881 and has developed from a small boiler cleaning company into a leading surface protection companies, covering sectors throughout ship new building and repair, wind turbines, offshore platforms, onshore oil and gas facilities, petrochemical installations, complex steel structures and bridges. Headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, Muehlhan has offices in over 13 countries - from Europe and the U.S. to Asia and the Middle East. Long-term relationships with growing and globally active customers have forced Muehlhan to develop The company has its own in-house R&D unit, a factor which has led to significant technological innovations. Amongst these so called �-technologies, the R&D department has developed �-jet and �-arc. The latter stand for abrasive, recycleable, containerized and describes a compact system for blasting steel surfaces utilizing recyclable steel grit. The �-arc system consists of a blasting unit, which is combined with a storage hopper for the steel-grit, a recycling unit and a vacuum hopper plus pump. Additional air dryers contribute to and maintain a micro climate where confined spaces such as tanks can be grit-blasted whilst the blasting grit is being recycled, thus reducing grit consumption and costs. The individual modules are built into 10-ft. racks and can be exchanged individually. It is designed to be space-saving, easy to handle, transport and lift and, therefore, suitable for flexible operation in a shipyard, on decks or whenever limited working areas are an issue. The use of these recycling units can minimize the use of cranes, the transport, the storage and the ultimate disposal of "one way" abrasives, thus keeping the working area completely free from pollution and dust. Another patented technology is �-jet. It takes Ultra-High-Pressure Abrasive Blasting (UHPAB) to new heights by combining two blasting processes, namely: Traditional dry blasting and ultra-high-pressure water jetting. In conventional dry blasting the abraMarch 2009 www.marinelink.com 43
sive beads hit the steel at speeds of between 120 - 150 meter per second (=383 mph), while in water jet blasting achieves speeds of around 600 meter per
second. The �-jet technology combines both of these processes, as the solid abrasive grain and the water come together in a special nozzle. The faster
water jet accelerates the abrasive grain to around 540 meter per second. Muehlhan reports that its customers have found the �-jet process to be excel-
Request for Quotation For the Complete Replacement of the R/V Kilo Moana's Computerized Ship Control and Power Management System. Questions and Detailed RFP POC - Capt. Gray Drewry, Honolulu, Hawaii, 808-842-9813 or gray@soest.hawaii.edu Closing Time and Date 1530 31 July 2009 Hawaii Time
2