• Marine

Dampier: more wharf traffic down under

James Fisher's industry-leading marine engineering expertise has been called upon to investigate increasing the capability of a floating pontoon at the Port of Dampier in Western Australia.

The Patrick Marine Facility (PMF) was originally designed by Maritime Engineers as a safe mooring solution for vessels servicing and operating in the challenging offshore environment of the Northwest Shelf region. Now the team is working closely with owners, Patrick Bulk Port Services (PBPS) on enhancing the structure to safely increase efficiency and expand operating capacity to accept vessels of up to 90m length (the wharf was originally designed to accommodate vessels up to 80m in length).

The team has carried out dynamic mooring analysis on the structure and dynamic analysis expert, Tanya Valova was brought in to work with Mojo Maritime on developing the computer simulations to help establish upper limits of the weather criteria for safe mooring.