Tagged: ore berth

Toward the end of 2010 we featured a radical new floating berth design for London Mining’s iron ore facility in Marampa, Sierra Leone.

QuayQuip’s specialist engineers are now installing and commissioning the berth. In the coming weeks, barges of 20,000 tonne displacement (16,000 tonne DWT) will arrive to begin the transfer of iron ore to ships moored in deeper water.

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QuayQuip has just won another major order for an iron ore transhipment berth, following the recent success with Moma Sands. The London Mining plc’s Marampa Iron Ore Mine will be served by a barge loading facility at Thofayem, 50km upstream of from the Sierra Leone capital Freeport, on the southern bank of the Port Loko River. The installation will be QuayQuip’s largest true ‘Flat Pack Port’ to date.

London Mining plc was founded in 2005 to supply ore to the global steel industry. Headquartered in the UK, it currently operates in Africa, the Americas, the Arabian peninsula and China. Marampa was acquired in 2006. The mine first operated between 1933 and 1975; approval was recently granted to London Mining to restart production. The facility is eventually expected to handle between five and eight million tonnes of ore per year.

In mid-October 2010, QuayQuip tendered for the manufacture and supply of the entire berth. The winning design’s main structure is a series of 22 floating, interlocking platform sections, each 12m long and 3.5m wide: a total length of 260m, 45 guide piles and a 30m gangway, all supplied by QuayQuip.

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Four years ago a trans-shipment jetty was built on the Mozambique coast to serve the Moma Sands mine, enabling the transfer of titanium ore and other heavy mineral ores to large vessels moored offshore.

The initial fender installation was not up to capacity for normal operations. QuayQuip are replacing the four existing single-cone systems with tougher double-cone systems that absorb quadruple the energy, and adding four more on the opposite side to create a double-sided berth. New Donut fenders (also known as ‘monopile fenders’) guide motorised, self-loading/unloading barges safely around the end of the jetty. Read more…

QuayQuip just took innovative fender systems a step further with a US $1.75 million Pivot Fender installation, built and installed in China.

Every year the port is scheduled to handle up to 27.6 million tonnes of processed ore using 16,000dwt barges. The berth posed several design challenges: barges may impact the berthing structure over a 13m height range, and wave action on the structure could impose significant upward forces. The design had to take resonance and overturning moments into account.

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