A Propeller is born: Casting of the "Berlin Express" propeller

Who can say they have been there live while a ship's propeller with a diameter of 9.3 meters is being cast into its mold? Some Hapag-Lloyd colleagues from Hamburg had this luck in November and experienced the impressive moment of the creation of the "Berlin Express" retrofit propeller on the factory premises of Mecklenburger Metallguss GmbH (MMG) in Waren an der Müritz.

At 2 p.m., the time had come. "Gut Guß!" was the word, and the molten, red-hot aluminum bronze poured out of two ladles weighing several tons into the individually prefabricated mold made of concrete: the birth, so to speak, of the ship's propeller for the "Berlin Express". To cast the propeller, which weighed 61 tons at the end of the production process, more than 100 tons of aluminum bronze were heated to 1500 degrees and processed.

In the coming weeks, the 5-bladed propeller will be broken out of the mold, carefully inspected and machined to its final shape in several steps before it is accepted by DNV in mid-January and transported to the Port of Hamburg. There it will go as Special Cargo to one of our ships, to be then in time for the retrofit of the "Berlin Express" in the shipyard in Dubai.

The propeller replacement is part of the Fleet Upgrade Program, which will make Hapag-Lloyd's existing fleet more efficient. In total, almost 100 ships will be equipped with new propellers from MMG, which in individual cases can save up to 10 percent CO2 emissions in ship operations.