Tiankun, the country’s magic weapon, is built by Chinese youth!

A national treasure

The sharp auger "gnaws" the hard rocks on the seabed, and the sea sand is then blown to a place more than ten kilometers away... The dredging "artifact" Tiankun is the largest heavy self-propelled dredging vessel in Asia and is a veritable "national treasure."

What is less known is that the crew behind this ship, which has created many world firsts, is a young team with an average age of 32, of which nearly 70% are under 35 years old. It is this group of "wave riders" who conquer the surging waves with their youth and passion and hold up the century-old dream of "national ships and national construction". On this year's May 4th Youth Day, the Tiankun team of CCCC Tianjin Navigation Engineering Bureau was awarded the collective title of the 26th China Youth May 4th Medal.

"There is a fish in the North Sea, its name is Kun"

Kun, named after an ancient Chinese legend, implies that Tiankun has shouldered the mission of being a "maritime power" and a "technological power" since its birth.

As a pioneer in China's dredging industry, CCCC Tianjin Port Engineering Group Co., Ltd., with a 120-year history of development, is like a giant ship sailing towards a new era. It responds to the "Belt and Road" initiative, continuously enhances China's competitiveness in the international high-end dredging market, and creates "dredging tools" for my country's offshore resource development and port and waterway construction.

The design and construction of Tiankun have integrated the design concept, application technology, construction technology and other advantages of the project "Independent R&D and Industrialization of Large Offshore Dredging Equipment", which won the special prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award. The continuous innovation and research have broken the technological blockade of Western countries, and it has completely independent intellectual property rights, becoming the epitome of "national ships and national manufacturing".

“Key core technologies cannot be obtained, bought or begged for.” Wang Dong, the young chief engineer of the Tiankun, who was recently awarded the title of “The Most Beautiful Port and Shipping Person”, always remembers these words from his master, Wang Jian, who was then the leader of the Tiankun’s construction supervision team.

Independence

At that time, China had no experience in designing and building such ships, and there was no simulated experimental environment for the construction of heavy self-propelled dredgers. From the preliminary design of the ship to the formulation of the technical specifications, and then to the production design, the entire process was difficult and could only be advanced step by step in actual production. For this reason, CCCC Tianjin Port Authority specially established a ship technical supervision team. Wang Jian volunteered to serve as the team leader and convened a number of young people to form a professional young technical team.

With a heavy responsibility on their shoulders, young technical talents represented by Wang Dong and Yang Jiawang challenged themselves to tackle the world's leading key technologies. They read hundreds of design drawings and references, walked through nearly a thousand cabins, and checked tens of thousands of welds. With such tenacity and excellent skills, they successfully broke through the technical barriers of Western developed countries, and successively achieved thousands of independent innovation results in key areas such as full electric drive, rapid island formation, and ultra-long-distance transportation, realizing a major leap in my country's dredging equipment technology from following and running side by side to leading the world in key technologies.

As a milestone in the high integration of my country's high-tech and heavy equipment manufacturing, Tiankun has achieved a perfect transformation from "Made in China" to "Smart Manufacturing in China". Tiankun's excavation capability and intelligence level are among the best in the world, its long-distance transportation capability is the best in the world, its ability to adapt to harsh sea conditions is the strongest in the world, it has achieved unmanned automatic excavation, and it has global unlimited navigation area seaworthiness and the ability to operate safely under harsh conditions.

In May 2021, General Secretary Xi Jinping listed Tiankun as one of the important achievements in my country's strategic high-tech field in his important speeches at the Conference of Academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the 10th National Congress of the Chinese Association for Science and Technology, which greatly inspired all Tiankun youth to remain committed to achieving high-level scientific and technological self-reliance.

As soon as it was put into production, the young team of Tiankun became the backbone of this "national heavy equipment". They used the innovation and wisdom of young people to continuously demonstrate the hard power of China's dredging equipment to the world.

First victory

The first battle was to compete with the world's top dredging flagships in the Far East project. The young men fought 24 hours a day in the severe cold and snow, eating and sleeping on the deck. This time, they faced a 70 MPa hard rock challenge, which means that the Tiankun would have to attach 700 kg of force to each square centimeter of rock to "bite" it. The super-hard rock had a great impact on the ship's machinery and equipment. Wang Dong led the engine department to adapt to the management of ship machinery and equipment at the fastest speed, completing more than 100 self-study and expanded self-study.

One morning, the barge pipe on the ship suddenly broke down. Wang Dong jumped out of bed and rushed to the construction site at minus 30 degrees Celsius. There were no drawings to support the structural analysis of this section of the pipeline. Wang Dong could only rely on his own experience to gradually investigate and eliminate the problem and find the "cause". After 85 hours, the fault was resolved without delaying the construction schedule for a single day.

The first show of Tiankun after returning to China was to help Lianyungang Port build a "bridgehead" at the eastern end of the Maritime Silk Road. Due to the viscosity of the soil, Tiankun operated overloaded for a long time, and the mud pump was seriously worn. Chang Ziren, a young man born after 1995, rose to the challenge and teamed up with his master Wang Dong to solve the fault of the hydraulic pump control proportional amplifier board. At the same time, they carried out more than 20 self-repair projects such as underwater pump disassembly and inspection, saving more than 10 million yuan.

During the hard rock excavation construction at Qinzhou Port, Gao Jianwei led everyone to transform the ship's transverse anchor and proposed the "tooth seat replacement method", replacing the anchor tip with a tooth seat and installing a reamer to increase the depth of the anchor tip into the mud, increase the grip of the transverse anchor, and reduce the frequency of anchor dragging.

In this way, Tiankun can "chew" hard rock more easily, has good mud penetration effect and is easy to replace, which greatly shortens the ship's anchoring time and increases the hourly rate by nearly 15 percentage points, ensuring the completion of the Beibu Gulf's 100th anniversary tribute project.

During the sprint stage of the expansion project of the Binhai LNG project in Yancheng, Jiangsu, electrician Wang Shang invented the "F-type open-end wrench specifically for the opening and closing positions of gate valves", which improved the adjustment work that originally required two people carrying two large open-end wrenches to operate into one that only requires one person carrying special tools. It can also be used for rapid troubleshooting and maintenance, greatly saving manpower, material resources and time.

Since its commissioning, Tiankun Youth has raised the ship's hourly rate to about 95%, far exceeding the average domestic cutter suction dredger. The "Kun Youth" team has also grown stronger and stronger, completing more than 100 technical innovations such as underwater pump automatic control systems, filling in many gaps in domestic and foreign professional fields.

"We have always been committed to building a world-class crew team that matches the 'national heavy equipment'," said Huo Zongjie, Party branch secretary of Tiankun. Tiankun has always been committed to the goal of "world-class ship", treating the project as a "battlefield" and the reamer as a "weapon", and making every effort to build a Tiankun youth iron army that dares to fight, can fight, and is good at fighting.

Tiankun focuses on the development trend of the global industry. With its world-leading operating system and equipment strength, it has established the "Kun Youth" innovation studio, deeply integrating youth innovation into production practice, and independently completing more than 100 technological innovations such as the "underwater pump automatic control system", filling many gaps in domestic and foreign professional fields. At the same time, the ship also strives to cultivate a group of technical experts and "great country craftsmen" who lead the development of professional disciplines such as cutters, mud pumps, and electrical engineering through "Youth Lecture Hall" and "Double Mentors Leading Apprentices". The chief boatswain Yang Chunbiao was awarded the honorary title of "National Transportation Technology Expert".

In the face of the difficulties and bottlenecks that continue to appear in the production process, Tiankun has created a "dare to fight and win" sharp knife class. Young backbones such as Gao Jianwei and Wang Chunmin led the team to innovatively use big data analysis to carry out skill competitions, consolidate typical construction experience, and improve ship production efficiency by nearly 15 percentage points; the rapid troubleshooting commando composed of more than 10 young backbones such as Sun Ran and Wang Pin has improved the "single soldier" combat capability of the ship under difficult working conditions overseas...

On the day when they won the collective title of the 26th China Youth May Fourth Medal, the young crew of Tiankun are still working on key projects along the "Belt and Road" and continue to strive to open up a new energy transportation channel in the extreme cold regions of the Far East. For them, the best form of youth is to write a chapter of youth for a strong generation on the land.

Source: Communist Youth League Central Committee

Editor: Wang Yixun

Proofread by Chen Yuwen

Proofread by Sun Xiaoqian

On-duty editor: Zhong Yanan