Wärtsilä has secured a contract to supply its Aquarius UV ballast water management system (BWMS) to South Korea, in what is the first BWMS retrofit contract signed by the marine technology company in the country.
Wärtsilä is to supply its BWMS for four bunkering ocean tanker vessels operated by South Korea’s Doorae Shipping.
The retrofitting will allow the vessels to be in compliance with the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) Ballast Water Management Convention, which is applicable to existing vessels by their next special survey after September 2019. The regulation aims at preventing the spread of harmful aquatic organisms from one region to another, and halting damage to the marine environment from ballast water discharge.
The order was placed by PanStar TechSolution, the main contractor for the project. PanStar is a Korean engineering and technical company specializing in BWMS and exhaust gas cleaning system (EGCS) retrofit projects.
“We already work closely with Doorae Shipping because of the maintenance agreement we have with them, and we are very pleased to have been selected against tough competition to supply the BWMS solutions,” Woo Ho Yoo, General Manager, Services, Wärtsilä Korea, said.
Scheduled for delivery to South Korea in August 2020, the Aquarius UV BWMS is based on a two-stage treatment process. Upon uptake, seawater is first passed through a back washing screen type filter. The filtered seawater then passes through a UV chamber where ultra-violet light is used to disinfect the water before entering the ballast tank. On discharge, water from the ballast tank is pumped through the UV chamber for a second time to complete the disinfection process prior to discharge.
The system was granted US Coastguard (USCG) Type Approval earlier this year.