ASRY achieves scrubber retrofit in record time

ASRY says that a key reason it was able to achieve a short retrofit period, was by carrying out very detailed engineering well before the vessel arrived.

ASRY (Arab Shipbuilding & Repair Yard), Bahrain, has completed the retrofit of an exhaust gas scrubber on a VLCC within 33 days of the ship’s arrival at the shipyard.

Because of IMO 2020 mandates, scrubber retrofit projects are currently dominating repair yard schedules and ASRY had completed eight such projects by the end of 2019, with “many more” on its order books for 2020.

The new record of 33 days is one of the fastest turnarounds of a scrubber project in the Arab Gulf region and is all the more notable in that it also involved a simultaneous BWMS retrofit on the same vessel.

“Being able to provide customers with these region-leading project delivery times is exactly the kind of performance indicator we are committed to achieving,” says ASRY Managing Director, Mazen Matar. “We were able to reduce the duration of the project due to a combination of committing to a ‘lessons learned’ process from similar projects, multi-departmental collaboration, and full open communication lines with customers, makers and all other stakeholders before, during and after the project, ensuring correct preparation.”

This particular project was the last in a series of installations undertaken by ASRY between May and December last year for Springfield Shipping, the technical manager for the Onassis Group’s Olympic Shipping.

Although Springfield had carried out the classification design, through its design consultants, it relied on ASRY’s engineering team to complete all balance engineering. Accordingly, Springfield shared hull models, 3D scans, scrubber model and the associate piping model, with ASRY, which received gigabytes of data efficiently into its IT systems. ASRY uses CADMATIC for 3D modeling and used the software for importing all 3D models and further engineering.

ASRY says that a key reason it was able to achieve a short retrofit period, was by carrying out very detailed engineering well before the vessel arrived.

The lessons learned from the 2019 retrofit projects have now been integrated into ASRY’s procedures to ensure similar efficiency for projects in 2020.