Ampelmann

More Applications

The Ampelmann Company continuously strives to adjust its products to the needs of the offshore industry. A few examples of new developments that Ampelmann is currently working on are explained below.

Continuous access

Providing continuous acces to the structure is made possible with the additional slideway. The slideway exists of an aluminum gangway that is attached with a ball joint to the upper frame of the motion system on one side, just underneath the transfer deck. On the other side, the gangway is mounted on a 10 foots container on top of which it can slide back and forth and rotate horizontally. Because the Ampelmann system compensates for most of the vessel motions, the aluminum gangway hardly slides even when the vessel is heavily moving.

Ship-to-ship

The current gangway is used for passive compensation only. With some small adjustments, the gangway can be used for actively following a moving target such as a buoy or an FPSO. This way, landing onto a moving target can be made possible. Once the tip of the gangway has landed, the gangway is set back to passive compensation mode so that it can follow all relative motions between the transfer deck and the tip of the gangway. This ship-to-ship concept has been tested offshore in the summer of 2008 and will be implemented in the latest Ampelmann systems.

M-type

Some regions in the world use crew baskets and swing ropes for crew changes. As these regions mostly have a huge amount of offshore structures requiring a lot of day-to-day crew changes, small and fast crew boats are usually used for this. </p><p>For these crew boats, Ampelmann are developing a smaller system, called the M-type. Please see an animation of how the M-type on a fast crew boat looks like. If you are interested in the M-type, please fill out the contact form here.

Heavy lift

Currently, the Ampelmann is suited for crew transfer only, which compares to a safe working load of 300 kg @ 20m. The unit itself has a much higher capacity for loads that are in the centre of the deck. If the transfer deck + gangway are removed, the Ampelmann can carry about 30 tonnes. The heavy lift Ampelmann has been developed in concept for float-over installation with 4 units carrying 12,000 tonnes in total.

At the moment, a 250 tonnes unit is being designed together with offshore wind turbine installation contractors. With 2 of these systems, offshore mono pile transfer (300-500 t) can be made possible.

Ampelmann used for heavy lift operations