Divers have a blast with cavitation cleaning

Cleghorn’s standard diver operated 2,000psi units have been put to good use at a Thames Estuary wind farm installation and at dockyard piers. Cleaning tasks included anode inspection after six years immersion and pier structures needing examination for insurance purposes. The units removed the marine growth quickly, economically and safely.

The cavitating water plume from the unit’s nozzle does not damage the material being cleaned and does not damage coatings such as anti-fouling paints or modern foul release coatings and materials. This has proved useful where cleaning is in the vicinity of vulnerable installations, such as wind farm power cables where high pressure blasters could cause a safety hazard.

Cleghorn maintains that cavitation cleaning offers significant advantages over current techniques in both speed of operation and elimination of the risk of damage.

The capability has also been deployed using ROVs and found to give major time savings over conventional cleaning processes, a significant benefit given the high cost of ROV operations. Variants of the CaviBlaster machines have now been introduced for installation on ROVs, taking advantage of the relatively low power required to drive the CaviBlaster compared with a high pressure blaster, and so making less demands on the limited ROV power budget.

More field testing, with the larger series YC 2040 CaviBlaster model developing 4,000psi, have been scheduled to demonstrate that the higher pressure unit does not affect vulnerable coatings. The higher pressure gives improved cleaning in deep water compared with the 2,000 psi units, and is therefore well suited to ROV operations which can take place at greater depths than diver operations.