WaveWalker Wins British Engineering Award

Fugro Seacore recently collected the New Mechanical Product of the Year award for the WaveWalker 1 walking jack-up at this year’s British Engineering Excellence Awards (BEEAs).

WaveWalker is an eight-legged walking jack-up barge (self-elevating work platform - SEWP) which was designed especially for marine operations in rough seas, surf zones, beaches and other intertidal locations where operation of traditional SEWPs is uneconomic. As well as operating safely whilst elevated, its bidirectional movement allows it to move and relocate without floating. Because the impact of sea conditions on operations is reduced, WaveWalker can considerably boost productivity in tasks such as geotechnical site investigations, drilling, trenching, pipeline and cable-laying, blasting and other marine and underwater work.

Fugro Seacore provided design and engineering expertise to create the jack-up barge which is owned and operated by WaveWalker BV, a joint venture between Fugro Seacore and Van Oord. In January this year WaveWalker 1 commenced its first project, where it undertook drilling and rock blasting works in the outer channel to the port of Suape in Brazil.

Commenting on the award, the judges said, “When it came to New Product of the Year, the vast scale of the winning WaveWalker project was the first thing to impress the judges.”

The BEEAs were established in 2009 to demonstrate and promote the quality of engineering and design within the U.K. The winners are determined by a panel of high quality, independent judges and companies from a cross section of electronic and engineering design disciplines.

Fugro Seacore’s project design engineers Dan Harris and Steffen Phillips, who both worked on the design of the WaveWalker, collected the award at the London ceremony.

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