Which one is it? I will tell you right now. Meyer Werft, Germany, dock specifications, 504 meters long, 125 meters wide and 75 meters high. It is the largest indoor dock in the world.

Meyer Werft, the shining pearl of the world shipbuilding industry

In the west of Lower Saxony, Germany, less than 20 kilometers away from the Dutch-German border, there is a little-known town. ——Papenburg, with an area of ??only 118.36 square kilometers and a population of less than 40,000.

However, it is such a small town that gave birth to a world-famous professional manufacturer of luxury cruise ships that has stood for more than 200 years - Meyer Shipyard.

Meyer Werft GmbH is the largest shipyard in Germany today. It was founded in 1795 by the Meyer family. Mr. Bernard Meyer is the sixth generation. He has been in charge of the entire company since 1982 until now. This year his son Jan Meyer was appointed general manager and gradually began the succession work. Meyer is the family name, and Werft means shipyard in German. In 1997, Meyer Werft acquired the Neptune Shipyard in Rostock, northeastern Germany. In 2014, it took over from the STX Group the Turku, Finland, which is also famous for building luxury cruise ships. shipyard.

In the long history, Meyer started by building small wooden ships. In 1874, he began to build iron ships, and finally delivered passenger ferries, ro-ro ferries, liquefied gas ships, container ships, and livestock carriers. , inland river cruises, ocean cruises, ocean research vessels and more than 700 ships of various types. With the rise of the Asian shipbuilding industry and taking away most of the orders for ordinary civilian ships, Meyer gradually focused its business on luxury cruise ships. It survived the fierce and cruel market competition and shined in this top field of the industry. .

The Meyer Werft headquarters in Papenburg can be said to be the most modern shipyard in the world and a typical representative of the German Industry 4.0 era. It has the largest indoor dry dock in the world to date. The first indoor dock was completed in 1987, with a length of 370 meters, a width of 101.5 meters, and a height of 60 meters. In 1991, it was lengthened to 470 meters. In 2000, the second giant indoor dock was built, which is 504 meters long, 125 meters wide and 75 meters high. With more than 3,300 regular employees, Meyer also has about 1,500 outsourced workers, mainly from Eastern Europe. It can build three cruise ships a year at the same time. Since 1985, 40 luxury cruise ships have sailed out from here, sailing around the world. All oceans. Currently, Meyer Werft's backlog of orders has scheduled its workload until 2020, which is a unique sight in the sluggish shipbuilding market.

1. Safety

Shipbuilding is a heavy industry and a high-risk industry. Safety management is very critical and fully reflects the awareness and level of shipyard management. It can even be said that the quality of safety work is directly proportional to the production efficiency and quality level of the shipyard. What's more, due to the particularity of the luxury cruise project itself, security work is even more important.

Like many Chinese shipyards, you need to swipe your card to enter and exit the factory. In the later stages of cruise ship construction, you also need to swipe your card to get on and off the ship. During the trial and delivery stages, you even have to submit your passport. Also take it up. Every new arrival at the shipyard must first receive safety education from the shipyard and watch a ten-minute short film, which is available in both German and English versions, before they can obtain an ID card specially made for them and start work.

2. Black Technology

If there is no modern equipment, how can it be worthy of being an Industry 4.0 shipyard?

Let’s take a look at what black technologies the Germans have come up with in order not to be defeated by China, Japan and South Korea:

1. The magical inspection form and scanning pen.

As a surveyor, the most annoying task every day is to write the inspection report, photocopy the inspection report, scan the inspection report, and organize the inspection report.

Here, after the inspection is completed, QA takes out an inspection report sheet that looks like an English test answer sheet. Various inspection types and possible questions have been preset. You just need to Put a cross on the corresponding item or write the corresponding program code, then write a little description, fill in the date and signature, and it's OK. You also know that a foreigner's signature is like a ghost drawing, and no one can recognize it except you, so everyone is assigned a numerical code. This must be written next to the signature so that the number can be matched.

2. Laser welding

Laser welding technology has long been widely used in the automobile industry, but it is very rare in the shipbuilding industry. Meyer Werft, located in Germany, a country with a strong automotive industry, actually successfully applied this technology to shipbuilding 20 years ago. Laser welding has the advantages of high speed, high strength, small heat input, and small deformation, and is very suitable for use in cruise projects with a large number of thin plates welded.

Meyer Werft makes extensive use of laser welding on panel butt joints and profile fillet welds. All these welds are performed in their Laser Center. They use seven large lasers. Welding units with a maximum output of 12 kW per unit. The laser unit, guided by a crane frame, is able to join steel plates in excess of 30 meters in length in a highly automated process. Due to the high degree of confidentiality and the fully automatic operation, I couldn't go in and take pictures. The following short video introduces it a little, so you can experience it.

3. Welding robot

Meyer Shipyard has also introduced a welding robot with a 360-degree rotating robotic arm. Workers only need to enter some parameters in the control panel, and then Start the program, and the robot will start automatic distance measurement and positioning, automatic welding, and automatic movement, including flat welding, horizontal welding, vertical welding, and overhead welding.

4. Cabin three-dimensional laser scanning technology

What is this used for? This is a new method of cabin strength testing.

The usual steps for a cabin strength test are as follows: Select the cabin to be tested, fill it with water according to the test pressure, and walk around the bulkhead to confirm that there are no problems before draining the water. Drop it off, and then this cabin can be used for the next step of work. Because people have to walk around and look at it, the insulation on the bulkhead must not be installed, and some pipes cannot be connected. Sometimes the cabin cannot be sanded and painted. All these must wait until the strength test is completed before we can continue. .

So the Germans used their brains. The production progress was waiting for no one. Can they improve it? So one day, their eyes suddenly lit up and they discovered that Leica was another German black technology company. A laser 3D scanner. This thing can conduct a three-dimensional scan of the cabin and can measure millions of points in one hour, thereby presenting the hull structure of the cabin on the computer. The measurement error is less than 2 millimeters within a range of 10 meters.

So they changed the steps of the strength test to: do what should be done in the cabin first. After all the work is completed, use a laser scanner to conduct a three-dimensional scan to obtain an initial data. Then fill the cabin with water according to the test pressure and scan again. Comparing the results of the two scans can determine the amount of bulkhead deformation.

5. Digital X-ray machine

X-ray inspection is a type of non-destructive testing and is usually used for quality inspection of various butt welds. Generally, shipyards use traditional film X-ray machines. Digital X-ray machines are mostly used for medical imaging testing, but Meyer also uses them in shipbuilding.

6. Guest room unit assembly line

One of the characteristics of cruise ships is that there are so many rooms.

Generally speaking, only the bathroom part of the accommodation cabin of an ordinary cargo ship is modularly produced, and the other room wall panels, furniture, etc. are all assembled on site. Of course, this model is also in line with actual production needs, because the average cargo ship only has a dozen or so rooms in total.

However, there are more than 2,000 rooms on a luxury cruise ship that accommodates four to five thousand people. If all these rooms are assembled on site, firstly, a large number of manpower will be required, and secondly, it will affect the simultaneous advancement of other professional work, which will bring great difficulties to production management and cost control.

To solve this problem, Meyer built a guest room unit manufacturing plant next to the shipyard. Most of the rooms on the ship are modularly produced into rectangular guest room units like containers. Only a few irregular rooms or luxury suites in the corners are assembled on site.

The production of the entire guest room unit is carried out on the workshop assembly line. Some parts are put in at one end, and a room comes out at the other end. There are workers at each station responsible for the corresponding assembly process. Some are responsible for installing walls, some are responsible for making doors, some are responsible for installing furniture, some are responsible for arranging pipelines, and some are responsible for inspecting and debugging. After all these steps are completed, the guest room units are transported to a place like an IKEA warehouse for storage, waiting for instructions from the shipyard.

3. Project Management

The delivery method of luxury cruise ships is different from that of general cargo ships. The cruise ship owner requires that the ship must be delivered on the precise date stipulated in the contract. Under the trend of modular construction, complex overall arrangements for various suppliers and sub-modules are required, which requires high project management capabilities.

Meyer Werft has been in the cruise market for decades and has made considerable achievements in management.

This is the node schedule of one of the cruise ships. The "Planstart" column is the expected node date of the production plan, and the green date column is the actual node date. Anyone who has engaged in shipbuilding production knows this. , this error is shockingly small.

An article on Ctrip Cruises said that it takes eighteen months to build a cruise ship, which is actually inaccurate. Although Meier was very efficient, eighteen months was not enough. Eighteen months should be counted from the time when the keel is laid.

This is the construction schedule of the 150,000 gross tonnage cruise ship "Norwegian Getaway" delivered by Meyer Werft for Norwegian Cruise Line in 2014. Although the contract was signed in September 2010, the actual construction started in 2011 September, so that’s almost two years and four and a half months. Considering that the shipyard may not necessarily operate at full capacity after the ship is started, the ship delivery work was actually completed at the end of 2013, but the signature was only placed in January 2014. Therefore, the complete construction cycle of such a cruise ship is almost two years, which is quite fast.

4. Technical Standards

Meyer Shipyard has established a set of very detailed technical standards. How detailed is this set of standards? It is as detailed as the type and type of each cabin fitting. There are clear requirements for the specifications of each staircase, how to connect each flange, how to label each pipe, etc.

The biggest benefit brought by standardization is the doubled increase in efficiency.