Date

January 5th, 2017

Safety alert Subject

Exploded slewing drive E-04

Contact
Tijmen Hofman
tijmen.hofman@ampelmann.nl
+31 6 4683 9033

(For internal use only)

Recently, a slewing drive on the E-04 GXL-21 had

exploded because of an unfortunate build-up of nitrogen
gas on the hydraulic side of the system. The steel
housing of the slewing drive had been shattered into
multiple shards that potentially could have had a lethal
impact if a person had been located in the direct vicinity
of the system; pieces of steel were found 15 meters away
of the system.

Cause:
The reason for this pressure build-up and for it to cause
the slewing drive to burst is that nitrogen gas had been
leaking passed the oil-gas interface in the PTA: the piston
seals. The exact root cause for this leakage is under
investigation. However, the fact that nitrogen gas is
leaking into the hydraulic side of the system is not
something that is unheard of within Ampelmann; last
year, a slewing drive on the A-27 had been cracked as
well because of nitrogen gas building up on the hydraulic
side of the system.

Consequences  High potential incident, damage & uncontained spill:

The soil where the E-04 was stored on was heavily polluted by a big oil spill that came out of the system
after the explosion. The soil had to be purified and cleaned up by a specialist.

Because of the needed repairs, the E-04 system is now not commercially available, pending the repairs
and investigation. The system had to be removed from the stored location at Franklin yard to the OZB.

Ampelmann Operations B.V.

Oostsingel 209, 2612 HL Delft, The Netherlands
+31 20 240 01 21, info@ampelmann.nl, www.ampelmann.nl
VAT NL820629224B01 COC 27340502
 Safety alert
Follow up actions:
A-27 incident
After the A-27 incident, amended
procedures were put in place to prevent
this from happening: when a system is to
be stored whilst not connected to an HPU,
the nitrogen set has to be shut closed and
the oil side of the PTA is to be pressurized
to get the remaining gas in the PTA
boosted into the nitrogen set.
(Link to procedure)

Regrettably, this procedure hadn’t be followed this time causing the slewing drive to explode on the E-04
system.

E-04 incident
Procedure
A fleet directive has been called out to check if all currently stored systems are stored correctly. This
storage procedure has also been emphasized in the demobilization manuals & checklists and
Management of Change will be put in place to have all potential users made absolutely aware of this.

Technical solution
We are now working on a technical solution to prevent gas pressure to build up on the hydraulic side of an
Ampelmann system. This is meant in case there would be gas leak.
Parallel to that, the investigation and root cause analysis on how gas is leaking into the hydraulics should
give us more information to take us further into getting our systems safer and more reliable.

Ampelmann Operations B.V.

Oostsingel 209, 2612 HL Delft, The Netherlands
+31 20 240 01 21, info@ampelmann.nl, www.ampelmann.nl
VAT NL820629224B01 COC 27340502