There is a constant demand for lightweight, cost-effective solutions in the offshore oil and gas sector, according to  Davíd Waage, sales and marketing director at Hampidjan’s offshore and seismic division.

‘There’s a relentless pursuit of opportunities in deeper water and being able to mobilise sophisticated, lightweight equipment is crucial in deployment and recovery operations in the offshore oil and gas field. Hampidjan’s DynIce® Winch Warps meet precisely the requirements the industry is making of us,’ he said.

Key to Hampidjan’s success in this field is its fibre rope, made with Dyneema® fibre supplied by DSM Dyneema, and over the past 12 years this has become the most extensively used and proven fibre rope for deep-sea winches, both on drum and traction winches in a variety of applications.

‘More than 600km of DynIce® warps in a variety of diameters and in lengths of up to 12 km have been produced,’ he said, pointing out that these single-length warps are long enough to extend from the surface to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the ocean’s deepest point. 

‘The capacity to produce rope with breaking strengths of up to around 2000 tonnes means that we can provide solutions for a great many applications,’ he commented and explained that Hampidjan has engineered DynIce® Winch Warps to behave, look, spool and feel like steel wire ropes, but with the key difference being that they have approximately 15% of the overall equivalent weight of the wire, as well as having a much longer working lifetime.

‘This eliminates the need to install expensive specialised fibre rope winching systems by retro-fitting existing wire rope systems with DynIce® Winch Warps, plus there are other advantages of this lightweight material. There is less abrasion on blocks and wire guiding-on gear and DynIce® Winch Warps are lighter, easier to handle and easily spliced.’

The overall density of DynIce® Winch Warps can be adjusted during the manufacturing process to the user’s required buoyancy, between 0.96 and 1.2 subject to the demands of the application. DynIce® Winch Warps have been successfully used on drums with up to 22 layers in operational conditions. 

‘When deployed, the neutral buoyancy of these ropes allows higher payloads compared to systems equipped with steel wire ropes,’ Davíd Waage said. ‘An additional advantage is that there is no need for the heavy grease that is part of using steel wire ropes, so without this heavy lubrication, both the winch and surrounding deck areas become cleaner and safer working areas. There in none of the scratching and abrasion we normally see on winch drum flanges and these Winch Warps don’t rust or degrade, which is one of the contributing factors to their significantly longer working lifetime.’