Our team led the detailed design of Offshore Marine Centre 2 (OMC2), a 7.5-hectare innovative maritime facility in Tuas, Jurong Port, that provides efficiency, safety and flexibility for fabricating and assembling of offshore structures.

OMC2 is a regional hub built to meet the demands of Singapore’s growing maritime and offshore industries. It was designed as a common-user fabrication centre for vessels requiring intermittent use of the waterfront, helping companies achieve greater efficiencies and costs. The performance parameters of OMC2 are an upgrade of the existing Offshore Marine Centre 1 (OMC1).

Penta Ocean Construction engaged our firm to provide a suite of services, including civil, structural, maritime, utilities, electrical and mechanical engineering. Our team engineered the wharf, staging areas and berths, building structures, and the bespoke scour protection and revetment walls which protect the wharf from erosion due to propeller wash and waves.

We refined the reference design and took the project through construction, completion and handover. With the aid of digital design, we trimmed down the initially suggested volume of concrete needed for the staging area’s slabs. This reduction translated into substantial savings in both concrete use and raw materials for the project.

Designing the wharf to withstand heavy marine loads

Our expertise was called on to design the wharf – one of the most complex areas in the facility. To support the incredible loads from the wharf and staging area and sculpt the coastline to provide the straight edge and deep berth, we implemented contiguous bored pile walls combined with tie beams for support.

Due to the differing profiles of the underlying soil, we produced different reinforcement cage designs with varying depths and orientations to suit every potential case. Before drilling each pile, we assessed the soil profile of the pile location and installed the most appropriate reinforcement case design.

At the staging area, our approach improved productivity by converting over 1,000 conventional bored piles, which are cast on site, to a driven spun pile scheme, which are produced off-site, resulting in significant time savings.

View over a construction site for an offshore marine centre in Singapore with cranes and machinery
View over construction site for an offshore marine centre in Singapore.

Leveraging digital design to use less concrete

Through advanced 3D structural analysis, we reduced the 4ha concrete slab used in the staging area from a thickness of 800mm, to 700mm. This approach saved of more than 4,000 m3 of concrete from the reference design.

In addition, we substituted 50 per cent of the cement volume with ground granulated blast-furnace slag (GGBS), a by-product from the blast-furnaces used to make iron, resulting in exceeding the current Singapore Green Building Council ratings by a wide margin. Compared to ordinary Portland cement, the manufacturing process of GGBS requires less than a fifth the energy and produces less than a fifteenth of the CO2 emissions.  The manufacturing of GGBS does not require the quarrying of virgin materials, and if the GGBS was not used as cement it would likely have been disposed of.

Future-proofing Singapore’s offshore and maritime industry

Global trade is increasing rapidly, resulting in an ever-growing demand for marine support facilities in Singapore. We ensured mooring facilities design would support future physical expansion plans and a wide range of vessels with varying drafts. To do this, we performed vessel analysis which incorporated horizon scanning of future vessels and rigs which could potentially use or be berthed at the OMC2 facilities.