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Ship repair & maintenance

Hull monitoring

Hydrex has now developed a new service simply named 'Hull monitoring', building upon the existing technical skills and know-how whilst taking advantage of new technology.

Inspections have long been a core service provided to enable the ship owner to get a firm assessment on some damage or problem that has occurred underwater. This can include an overall review of hull conditions but up until now, it has not been possible to carry out a thorough and detailed assessment on the condition of a ship's hull with the required degree of detail and documented certainty.

With fuel costs amounting to something like 40% of operational costs and with cost of fuel continuing to rise, savings on fuel have become a vital factor.

This is where hull monitoring comes in. Underwater hull roughness, marine fouling, bent propellers, poor paint condition are all factors that will increase the fuel costs due to the created drag or the inefficiency of the damaged part.
As part of the hull monitoring service, high quality underwater digital cameras are used to take, literally, hundreds of pictures of the hull for a thorough and exhaustive assessment later on, on the surface.

All this is done through the experienced eyes of our hull monitoring teams. They know where to look and what to look for. They have been trained to pick out tell-tale signs, poor conditions, and wear or damage. We have shown time and again that our underwater experts have been able to identify problem areas that were missed by earlier inspections.

The end result of the inspection is a detailed report identifying all areas that are less than optimum in relation to the ship's hull, along with an estimate of how this affects the overall efficiency of the vessel. Management will then be able to determine not only what steps should be taken, based upon a documented and reliable evaluation of the ship's hull condition but also the savings that can be gained from taking specific actions to remedy this.

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