Soil Machine Dynamics Ltd. (SMD) has signed a contract with Van Oord for the manufacture and delivery of a QTrencher 1600. This contract follows the successful deployment of SMD’s QTrencher 1400 on Van Oord’s Gemini Wind Farm.
Scheduled for delivery in Q1 2018, the trenching machine will be supplied with an SMD designed umbilical winch, along with jetting and mechanical cutting tools to tackle a wide range of seabed conditions. Additional functionality includes beach operation to offer cable installation for export and inter array campaigns.
The equipment will be loaded directly onto Van Oord’s cable-laying vessel Nexus from SMD’s Turbinia Works in Wallsend, UK. The QTrencher 1600 is scheduled to be deployed from the Nexus onto various wind farm projects in 2018.
“We have chosen SMD for a very good working experience with one of their machines [the QTrencher 1400] and their vast track record of the subsea trenching machines,” said Van Oord.
The QTrencher 1600 is the next generation of the QTrencher 1400 model, and the power available to the trenching tools has been optimized for offshore wind applications in shallow water. With 45 years of experience in the subsea trenching industry, SMD has developed a wide range of QTrencher vehicles from 400 to 2800 horse power, and has application across many markets, from telecoms, through to power cables and oil and gas construction.