Happy news from the two MEYER shipyards in Papenburg and Turku (Finland): On 04.12.2023, the Papenburg shipyard handed over its most recent cruise ship, the "Carnival Jubilee", to its US customer, the shipping company Carnival Cruise Line. The ship measures 42 meters in width and 345.4 meters in length and will be able to accommodate 5,374 passengers. The Turku shipyard had a reason to celebrate too: Also in December, they delivered the ocean liner "Icon of the Seas" to the shipping company Royal Caribbean International. With a width of 50 meters and a length of 365 meters, this ship can accommodate 5,610 passengers, which makes it currently the largest luxury liner in the world.
Graebener® congratulates MEYER WERFT and MEYER TURKU cordially on these milestones and is proud to have contributed to this success with its fully automated panel production lines. Both shipyards are working with innovative and globally unique production lines for the manufacturing of ship deck sections, which are able to process joints with four different plate thicknesses and which were developed for MEYER by the custom machine builder based in North Rhine-Westphalia.
The production of ship deck sections is a major technological challenge. Individual plates have to be joined together to form a large deck as automated, flexible and cost-efficient as possible - with different plate thicknesses, different plate lengths and the highest quality requirements for the joints.
The Graebener® panel production lines, so-called TWP® lines (Tailor Welded Plates), form the basis for ship deck prefabrication for both MEYER shipyards. This is where the individual plates arrive, are milled and welded together fully automated into large steel plates. The TWP® lines each consist of plate milling systems combined with state-of-the-art laser hybrid welding technology. The simultaneous milling and subsequent welding of the individual plates takes place in a single machine cycle. Both systems are able to produce ship deck sections up to 30 meters in width and 750 square meters in size. The production lines, with a weight of around 1,400 tons each, measure 2,300 square meters per line.
By commissioning the panel production lines, MEYER revolutionized global ship deck production, as they include Graebener® technology designed for MEYER: It allows the processing of plate joints consisting of four different materials and plate thicknesses. In contrast, all other shipyards worldwide can only process two different plate thicknesses in one joint. In general, the decks have to be produced as light as possible, but also as stable as necessary. MEYER has a clear advantage in this regard by being able to save material and therefore weight - without compromising on quality.
With the Graebener® milling technology, longitudinal and cross edges can also be simultaneously processed with such high precision that a weld seam preparation with zero gap for the subsequent laser hybrid welding process can be achieved even on deck widths of up to 30 meters.
Return to news overview