Recently, several burst accidents of floating pneumatic rubber fenders on ship-to-ship transfer operations have been reported around the world. In order to avoid such accidents, an international standard of floating pneumatic rubber fenders was prepared by technical committee ISO/TC8 and is to be published as ISO17357. In this paper, we conduct prototype tests based on ISO17357 and demonstrate procedures and evaluation methods.
Floating pneumatic rubber fender was developed in 1958 based on a rubber company's technology for rubber aircraft fuel tanks and automobile tires. The progress in the development of such floating pneumatic rubber fenders is closely related to the progress and development in ship technology, and has to continuously cope with larger and larger bulk carriers, oil and gas tankers such as VLCC's, ULCC's, large gas carriers and floating structures. Floating pneumatic fenders are used world wide mostly in ship-to-ship transfer operations, with guidelines provided by OCIMF (Oil companies international marine forum) (OCIMF; 1995,1997), terminals and by many countries' navy. These fenders play a critical role in the safe operation of ship berthing. Recently, several burst accidents of floating pneumatic fenders during ship-to-ship transfer operations of crude oil have been reported around the world. Whenever such an accident occurs there is the risk of injuries to personnel, ship damage and the possibility of an oil spill that could cause much harm to the environment and marine life. It was determined that variations of the originally designed floating pneumatic rubber with lower endurable pressure and/or the use of inferior materials had been introduced into the market. In 1997, to prevent any further decline in quality and performance of floating pneumatic fenders, all parties concerned started working together to create an international standard to specify material, performance and dimensions of floating fenders to keep ship-berthing operations safe.
