Wärtsilä’s AQUARIUS UV Ballast Water Management System certified for hazardous onboard areas
Wärtsilä, the marine industry’s leading provider of innovative products, solutions and services, has announced that its Wärtsilä AQUARIUS UV Ballast Water Management System (BWMS) has successfully completed verification testing for explosion proof (EX) requirements. The verification was handled through DEKRA, a Notified Body in Germany and a leading global provider of auditing and certification services, specialising in the fields of safety, environment and health. It now means that the AQUARIUS UV BWMS range is EX certified for Zone 1 hazardous area operation in marine and offshore installations, the company said in its press release.
It is an International Maritime Organization (IMO) requirement that the BWMS for ships having hazardous areas onboard must be EX proof certified. Wärtsilä has taken a systems approach to the EX validation process and the complete AQUARIUS UV BWMS module, not only electrical components, making it compliant with the EX and IMO regulations. This approach improves accessibility, since the modular design allows some system components to be located outside the hazardous area, thereby increasing the availability and maintainability of the whole system.
“This is yet another important step towards making the Wärtsilä BWMS range available for the full range of marine and offshore applications. We have taken the position that it is not enough to have merely the electrical parts certified, which is the case with many other systems. As a result, owners and operators can have the peace of mind in knowing that the entire Wärtsilä system module is explosion proof when installed inside a hazardous area,” says Dr Joe Thomas, Director, Wärtsilä Ballast Water Management Systems.
Ratification of the IMO’s Ballast Water Convention, which will require the owners of up to 40,000 vessels worldwide to install a BWMS, is widely anticipated. As a consequence, ship owners will need to evaluate, as a matter of some urgency, the ballast water treatment technology best suited to both their existing ships and future new build programs.
The system comprises a modular BWMS utilising a two stage approach involving filtration and medium pressure UV disinfection technology. The AQUARIUS UV BWMS completed land based testing in 2011 at the NIOZ test facility in the Netherlands. Ship-based trials were completed on a Dutch flagged 2,000 dwt chemical tanker, and were carried out by the independent consultants, GoConsult, and witnessed by Lloyds Register. The trials involved testing in both salt and fresh water environments to demonstrate compliance over a wider range of operating conditions. The results consistently met or exceeded the IMO D2 discharge standard. The Wärtsilä AQUARIUS UV BWMS received IMO Type Approval in December 2012 and US Coastguard AMS acceptance in October 2013.