China’s strongest diving support vessel delivered

“Oriental Dragon”, China’s most advanced ST-246 saturated diving operation support ship, was recently delivered to Guangzhou’s Nansha district.

The ship, developed by the CSSC Huangpu Wenchong Shipbuilding Co Ltd and the Shanghai Bestway Enterprise Development Group Co Ltd, is 124-meter long and 10.2-meter deep.

It is a professional deep-water marine engineering ship with a self-sustaining duration of 45 days and a capacity of 120 people. It is mainly composed of diving bells, high-pressure living cabins, transition cabins, life support systems and diving bell retracting systems.

The vessel is able to support 24 divers working 300 meters deep, which greatly improves human diving ability and efficiency.

In addition, it can meet a variety of operational requirements, such as saturated diving, air diving, deep-water surveying, remote operation and subsea construction.

The support vessel is widely used in the military, marine resources development and utilization, rescue and salvage, scientific research and other fields, so it has a significant strategic and economic value and has become an important indicator of a country’s marine engineering prowess.

With the continuous growth of national strength and equipment manufacturing capabilities, China has become one of the few countries in the world to master the 300-500m saturation diving technology.

Saturated diving operations emerged in the 1950s. The system allows divers to saturate the inert gas dissolved in the body by pressurizing beforehand, and then using the diving bell to return to the high-pressure transition cabin or living cabin.

In this process, the divers can solve physiological needs such as diet in the living cabin. The pressure on the divers does not change, so there is no risk of “decompression sickness”.

The decompression chamber also makes it possible to reduce pressure at once, and the diving efficiency is greatly improved. In this way, underwater operations can be carried out in batches and groups.