Page 62 - Practical Design Ships and Floating Structures

Practical Design of Ships and Other Floating Structures 37
You-Sheng Wu, Wei-Cheng Cui and Guo-Jun Zhou (Eds)
Q 200 I Elsevier Science Lld. All rights reserved

THE EXPERIMENT OF RIVER-SEA-GOING ORE BARGE FLEET
AND RENOVATION OF EXISTING INTEGRATED BARGE

Shun-Huai Chen ' , Wei Zhang , Jun-Ming Li ' and Cheng-Fang Wang '

1 Wuhan University of Technology,
Wuhan, Hubei, China
China Changiiang Shipping -up
Wuhan, Hubei, China

ABSTRACT
Wuhan Steel Company (Group) is one of the biggest steel factories in china. Large amounts of raw
material-iron ore used in this factory are imported from oversea. How to reduce the high producing
cost is a key problem. A new kind of shipping system composed of river-sea-going ore barge fleet has
been put forward to solving the problems such as high producing cost, environment pollution, etc. The
key technology of the system is to develop a new kind of barge which can be used to form a large
inland water pusher barge fleet and is suitable for navigating at sea. A typical pusher barge fleet at sea
is selected to test on full scale by which the reforming has been taken to the barge. Then a model test
has been carried out to check the reforming effects. In this paper, the conditions and results of tests are
described. Some useful conclusions are given so that they can be applied in renovation of existing
integrated barge.

KEYWORDS

Shipping system, River-sea-going ore barge, Full scale test, Model test, Renovation of existing
integrated barge, Pusher-barge-line, Integrated fleet

1 INTRODUCTION
Wuhan Steel Company (Group) is one of the biggest steel factories in china. Large amounts of raw
material-iron ore used in this factory are imported from oversea. The present shipping route includes
three steps. The first step is from oversea mining place to the coastal harbor of China - BEILUN by
150000-300000DWT cargo ships. And then 20000-30000DWT cargo ships are used to transport iron
ore from BEILUN to inland port like SHANGHAI port, NANTONG port, ZHENJIANG port. At last,
the iron ore are transported from idand port to the destination by integrated barge fleet. It is not
difficult to see from above that the steel producing cost is very high. It is a major problem that how to
reduce the producing cost for WSC. For shipping unit, giving the best service to the users is certainly