The International Association of Dredging Companies (IADC) has announced that their webinar, named ‘Dredging Equipment: Its Evolution, Capabilities and Importance for Maritime Infrastructural Works’, is scheduled for Wednesday, June 17, 2015, at 14.00 hrs (CEST, Central European Summer Time).
The webinar presenter will be Mr Frans Uelman, a lecturer and course coordinator of the IADC Dredging Seminars for more than 15 years.
Frans Uelman graduated with an M.Sc. in Civil Engineering and started his professional career as a research engineer and production estimator with Costain Blankevoort Dredging Company in 1978.
During the late seventies and the early eighties, he worked on many dredgers as a trouble-shooter, meanwhile developing data acquisition systems for the gathering of unbiased process data. After having been employed for a few years by a company, specialized in the automation of dredging processes, he joined Boskalis in 1987.
Since 2010 Frans is based at the Boskalis head office in the Netherlands.
The webinar background
Over the last 50 years the size of dredging equipment has grown tremendously.
The current generation of hoppers, cutters and backhoes have resulted in shorter execution times even for the largest maritime infrastructure projects. The investments in dredging vessels demonstrate the understanding that dredging contractors have for the ever increasing need for bigger ports and larger deep water land reclamations.
After the first jumbo trailer was built in 1994, eight more of these huge trailing suction hopper dredgers were built over the next 6 years. By 2000, 33,000 cubic metre so-called ‘mega’ dredgers were operational, i.e. their carrying capacity had doubled in almost 10 years time.
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