Huisman has developed a new system for the application of fiber rope in subsea deployment crane applications.

The system includes a hybrid fiber rope system which combines the advantages of fiber rope with subsea deployment, while the heave compensation is done with traditional steel wire rope systems, the company explained.

Cees van Veluw, Huisman’s product manager Cranes said: “We strongly believe in the future of cranes with fiber rope included – not just because of a CAPEX and OPEX evaluation, but also to further shift the limit of what can be deployed in subsea applications.

“Our extensive R&D programme, which has been active for over 10 years, has shown that the fiber rope with the best lifetime performance would require some serious active cooling of the fiber rope on the crane when performing active heave compensation. However, the actual thermal behaviour of fiber ropes in AHC have proven to be unreliable to predict and hard to measure. On top of that, having the active cooling system of the fiber rope as an essential part of the crane’s safety system is not the way we see robust and reliable crane design.”

Proper spooling of the fiber rope is done by Huisman’s traction winch and storage winch setup, while active heave compensation is done with a steel wire rope on a direct winch.

For traditional knuckle boom cranes, a 120mt and 200mt version is available, while the recently introduced hybrid boom crane can be delivered with larger capacities of 400mt and 600mt.