Water Injection Dredgers

Damen Field Service Engineers can assist your crew in the fast mobilisation of the WID kit. All elements are containerised and easy to transport and handle. The control of the WID system is done from the workboats bridge.

All Damen equipment has been designed to be repairable. This means that your WID system can be used for decades. Damen ensures that spare parts will remain available during its economic lifetime. Moreover, our team of field service engineers is ready to assist to keep your dredging equipment going.

You don’t have to build Damen equipment at a Damen yard. We can support construction at any yard in the world.

We provide a wide range of financing arrangements for all types of Damen vessels, equipment and products.

Generally speaking, dredging is the process to remove sediment from a water body such as a pond, a lake, a harbour basin, a river or even the sea bed. The sediment which is removed varies, and can be classified as silt, sand or gravel. These dredged materials are transported to another location.

The purpose of dredging roughly falls into two categories: sediment has to be taken out to clean an area, or the sediment itself is of interest for building purposes. 

When an area is cleaned by a dredger, it is called ‘maintenance dredging’. This type of dredging is very frequent: all harbours located on rivers will receive a constant influx of sediment. To keep these harbours accessible, this sediment has to be removed. Another reason to deploy dredgers is the constant need for building materials. Sand is required for road construction, and concrete for building activities requires sand and gravel.

Dredging is the complete process to excavate and remove sediment. Excavation can be done in two ways: by an excavator or digger, resulting in a mechanical excavation, which is called “mechanical dredging”. The removal of the sediment is done by dumper trucks. 

The alternative is “hydraulic dredging” where the digging action is done by a suction head, and the entire dredging process and sediment removal by a dredge pump. All Damen dredging equipment is hydraulic dredging equipment, thus fitted out with a dedicated dredge pump.

Dredgers can be divided into two categories: self-propelled dredgers and stationary dredgers. 

Self-propelled dredgers are for instance Trailing Suction Hopper Dredgers. These TSHDs have their own cargo hold [ ‘the hopper’] to transport the removed sediment. They load their hopper using a Trailing pipe System which is fitted out with a dredge pump, or by using an on-board excavator. 

Stationary dredgers such as Cutter Suction Dredgers do not have a propulsion system. They move their suction head by using winches and a spud anchoring system. Stationary dredgers do not have the possibility to store the removed sediment. It is pumped away directly using a floating pipe  line behind the dredger.

Maintenance dredging is an ongoing necessity in many ports, which could keep a TSHD continuously occupied. The combination of a WID with a TSHD ensures that a hopper dredger can be employed more efficiently. The WID can level out occasional high spots effectively, it can flush corners and underwater infrastructure without damaging them thus preparing the way for the TSHD.