On September 27, “CRCC Bridge Pile 1,” the world’s largest pile-driving vessel, which was invested by China Railway Construction Bridge Engineering Bureau Group, set sail from the foreign trade wharf at Lusi Port in Jiangsu.
The vessel will travel to Baía de Todos os Santos in the Brazilian state of Bahia to participate in the operation of the Salvador Cross-Sea Bridge—the largest cross-sea cable-stayed bridge in Latin America—marking a significant step forward as China’s high-end offshore engineering equipment advances into deeper and more distant waters to serve global offshore construction projects.
The “CRCC Bridge Pile 1″—capable of operating in water depths of up to 70 meters—is the world’s largest pile-driving vessel independently designed and built in China. Measuring 130.5 meters in length with a pile frame height of 156 meters and a pile-lifting capacity of 700 tons, it can drive massive piles with diameters of up to 7 meters. It addresses the operational bottlenecks faced by traditional pile-driving equipment in deep-sea and offshore environments with complex sea conditions—namely, “inability to reach, lack of precision, and instability.”
It marks the first integrated application of “DP (Dynamic Positioning) + anchor positioning” technology on a large-scale piling vessel; equipped with the domestically developed BeiDou high-precision satellite positioning system, the vessel achieves centimeter-level positioning accuracy for piling operations.
A closed-loop hydraulic system for the main cylinder was applied to pile-driving vessel for the first time; this system was entirely designed and manufactured domestically and recovers energy by converting the potential energy generated during the lowering or forward tilting of the pile frame into electrical energy, achieving an energy recovery rate of 40%.