NEWS
Chemco Continue Success in Cruise Market

Chemco’s popularity within the cruise ship industry is continuing to grow; providing all major cruise ship companies with innovative and cost-saving marine coating solutions for almost all areas of their vessels.

Chemco’s latest project highlights perfectly the substantial time and cost savings which have been provided to this industry for many years, which serves luxurious cruise ships of over 200,000 Gross Tonnage (GT).

One of the world’s leading cruise ship companies turned to Chemco to provide them with a ballast tank coating solution for over 10,000m², which can actually offer them a 15 years life expectancy.

The project was planned to be carried out during the cruise ship’s next scheduled dry docking. With major refurbishment work planned for this vessel during the dry docking mixed with the large associated dry-docking costs, the company was looking for a way to minimise the time the vessel would spend in the dry dock.

Chemco offered their innovative and IMO approved coating system for this application; which comprises of two products offering a solvent-free, wet & rust tolerant solution: Epo-chem™ RS 500P (Primer) and Epo-chem™ RA 500M (Topcoat). This solution has been successfully utilised within the marine coatings industry for over 15 years; with millions of square metres being applied with complete success.

The surfaces of the ballast tanks were prepared by water-jetting to WJ-3 standard. The unique solvent-free nature of Chemco’s universal epoxy primer RS 500P and the products’ excellent adhesion properties to a wet substrate allowed this coating to be applied on top of the wet substrate without the requirement to let the tanks dry. This alone saved the company two days; as with conventional paints you would normally require waiting for a couple of days until the tanks were completely dry before you could apply this type of coating.

As Chemco’s coating solution can ‘continue to cure’ underwater, within 6-8 hours of the topcoat RA 500M being applied (which was applied the next day) the ballast tanks were filled, and the cruise ship was ready to sail. Once again, this saved the company several days as conventional paints need to be completely dry before the ballast tanks can be filled with water.

Further cost savings were achieved as there are no humidity or dew point restrictions with these coatings; meaning there was no extensive equipment requirements which are normally required at great cost.

Furthermore, due to the unique combination of water jetting as the surface preparation method and the usage of solvent-free coatings, there was no disruption to the other ongoing maintenance and repair work (including hot work) throughout the cruise ship. This alone was a major benefit for the cruise ship company as the coating works and all other work could continue at the same time without worrying about potential health & safety and fire hazards.

It is also worth noting that for future maintenance and repair work, additional time and cost savings can be achieved. With conventional paints you are normally required to re-blast the previous coating (at high cost) before applying the new coating system. However, with Chemco’s unique solution there are no recoating limitations; which means that all future maintenance and repair work can be undertaken at minimal cost simply by roughening and cleaning the area required for repair and then applying a patch repair coat directly on top of the existing coating.

Chemco were also happy to offer a 10-year guarantee with this solution as the required surface preparation standards and coating specification was successfully achieved. The cruise ship company mentioned that they were extremely pleased with the performance of the coating system and couldn’t quite believe the overall time and cost savings they achieved by utilising this unique solution.