Intelligent Mooring with Timm Smart Ropes

Our one-of-a-kind digital mooring system, developed and refined over the past three years, is poised to dramatically improve mooring safety onboard vessels. We make ropes smarter and safer. Our first customers have tried it out. Read more here:

Bulk, cruise and Ro-Ro operators get smart with Wilhelmsen’s revolutionary digital mooring system

Offering consistently faster, more efficient, and safer mooring, Synergy Ocean, Viking Cruises, Berge Bulk and Finnlines have all signed up to be first to utilize Wilhelmsen’s one of a kind digital mooring system aboard their vessels.

Read more about Smart Ropes:
Helping to ensure mooring ropes have the right tension, in the right place, at the right time, all the time, our system makes over tensioned lines, premature wear of ropes and in the worst-case scenario unexpected rope failures a thing of the past.

Using a patent-pending measuring unit, embedded within one of our Timm Master ropes, while workers at berth and many crews, won’t notice the difference, it’s still a light and bright high quality Timm rope, the bridge will have access to essential information. Data which improves mooring operations, making them safer and more efficient and offers improved longevity for the ropes themselves. 

Housed in a cigar-shaped, heavy duty protective plastic baton, the sensor and battery weigh under 1kg. Sat within the core of our Timm Master mooring ropes, the unit transmits key tension, time and temperature information via the latest wireless communication to a command module located on the bridge. This data is processed and transferred to a live feed, running on a tablet on the ship’s bridge, backed-up in the cloud.

“This is an innovation that brings mooring operations into the 21^st century, but it is only the beginning. We envision a future where intelligent and automated systems will communicate, creating an ecosystem were winches can be adjusted automatically based on the tension, port duration is automatically determined, and new mooring lines are ordered and delivered when they are needed, not based on arbitrary schedules” - Magnus Dickens, Venture Lead

Offering invaluable live load distribution data, this provides vessels complete transparency when it comes to rope tension, with the bridge able to see the tension in each of their mooring lines, via a dedicated app with runs on a tablet or laptop. Tried and tested for the last 18 months aboard a working ro-ro vessel, our Smart Ropes system can help to reduce costs and ensure ropes are replaced only when they are needed.

The sensor, its housing and the command module elements have all been refined based on feedback from Hugg and Nordic Semiconductor. Also updated to facilitate a new iteration of the Bluetooth protocol, Bluetooth 5, our final version is now available to selected development partners.

Results from our testing suggests there is enormous potential for operational improvements

• Data recorded over a 4-month period showed that for more of 50% of the time the tension was below 5% of MBL, having little influence on the residual strength.

• The same two specific ropes had a high peak load every time when leaving a specific port. This indicates that the same ropes were consistently used to manoeuvre out of port, against the recommended guidelines.

• These ropes would have a significantly reduced lifespan. Changing ropes on a predetermined schedule would either lead to under-utilization of the reaming ropes, or risk of the exposed lines breaking.

The lack of insight into rope usage leads to inefficient replenishment and visual inspections are not sufficient to determine if ropes are deteriorating faster than expected. Due to high cyclical loads, the risks to ropes can go undetected.