Commitment to Quality and Safety

Samson:
Story and photos by John Gormley
Commitment to quality and safety
Top, Samson’s
600-ton-capacity
rope tester was
tailor made for
the company.
Below, Dr. Rafael
Chou, Samson’s
head of R&D,
holds a device for
scaling the roughness of materials
that could fray
rope.
40
R
afael Chou makes
Wash., create new high-perforsynthetic ropes do
mance products and improve
amazing things, even existing ones.
seemingly imposOne of the most remarkable
sible ones.
products to come out of Chou’s
A vice president of Samlabs is a kind of synthetic rope
son, Chou directs the corddesigned to replace fire wire.
age company’s research and
As the term suggests, fire
development efforts. Under his wires are lengths of wire line
supervision, a staff of 20 people that are suspended from the outat the company’s research and
board side of docked ships. The
development center in Ferndale, idea is that if a fire breaks out
and the ship needs to be pulled
away from the dock, tugs can
come alongside, latch onto the
fire wire and tow the ship away.
Fire wires are generally deployed by hand, Chou
explained, and crews are at risk
of back injury when doing so.
So ship owners were looking for
a lighter weight alternative that
would pose less risk of injury to
the people handling them.
A synthetic rope made of
organic materials would not
seem a likely choice. Exposed to
a propane torch, a typical synthetic rope would fail in about
30 seconds, according to Chou.
Chou was confident,
however, that he could
devise something that would
have the strength and heat
resistance required.
What he came up with is
a product named Vulcan, the
Roman name for the god of
fire. It consists of an aramid
core with a heat and fire-resistant coating. The test of course
was how long it could stand up
to an open flame.
When the new rope was
put to the test, people gathered
around to watch and were
amazed by what they saw.
“At five minutes people
started betting,” Chou said.
They did not believe that any
synthetic rope could last long.
In fact, the rope lasted more
than a hour of exposure to
direct flame.
Professional Mariner February 2011
Chou was granted a patent
for Vulcan fire rope in 2007, his
third since his arrival at Samson
six years earlier in 2001.
Today he and his organization have registered
seven patents.
The research and development work done by Chou and
his colleagues is fundamental to
Samson’s identity in the market.
“We want to compete on
quality and technology, not
on price…We do business
with customers who appreciate value,” he said. “Rather
than selling a product, we’re
selling a solution.”
In other words, Samson
wants its customers to think of
the company as the source of
the most technically advanced
cordage products available. And
Chou is arguably the person
most responsible for creating
and nurturing that image.
A decade ago, Samson’s parent, Wind River Holding Co.,
based in King of Prussia, Pa.,
decided it wanted to find a way
to differentiate Samson from
other cordage companies. The
way to do that, it concluded,
was through leadership in technology. And the way to achieve
that goal would be to create an
industry-leading research and
development facility.
Success would depend, of
course, on finding the right
person to run the R&D center.
Samson decided that person
would be Chou.
A native of Taiwan, Chou
received a degree in chemical
engineering from the National
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Taiwan University in 1982. He
came to the United States in
1986 on a scholarship to study
at the Polytechnic University in
Brooklyn, N.Y. (The school is
now a part of New York University.) He studied advanced
fiber materials. He was awarded
his doctorate in 1990 after
completing his thesis on the
interaction of engineering resins
and Kevlar. Next came four
years at the Textile Research
Institute, which is affiliated
with Princeton University.
That time included research
regarding how to define in a
quantitative way the specific
properties of composite materials.
“In order to improve a certain property, the first question
is how that property is defined,”
Chou explained. “If you can’t
define it, there is no way to
improve it.”
In 1994, he left the academic
world to work in the industry
for the first time, with ClarkSchwebel, a maker of specialty
fabrics in Anderson, S.C. The
products included printed circuit boards. He helped design
the interface between glass
fiber and epoxy resin. The
goal was to produce a product
with no voids between the
fibers and the resins.
“If there are any voids,”
he explained, “water gets in
and will short the circuit,”
clearly not a good thing in a
digital device.
In 1998, he moved to
Denver for a position with
the Gates Rubber Co., whose
products include timing belts
in cars. These belts are typically made of reinforced fiber
imbedded in rubber.
“Rubber is not very easy to
bond to coatings and adhesives,” he observed. His task was
to improve the bonds between
the rubber and the associated
materials forming the belts.
This background put Chou
at the leading edge of composite
materials technology. He was
an expert in engineering ways to
make composite
materials serve a
specific function.
In other words,
exactly the kind
of person Samson needed to
lead its R&D
initiative.
The emphasis
on innovation
seems to have
paid dividends
for Samson.
Revenues have grown about
2.5 times in the last seven years.
The marine side of the business,
which accounts for about 60
percent of the total, has grown a
bit faster than the inland side.
“New vessels, we’re driven by
that,” Chou said.
The company is trying to
expand it business base. In
2009 it added 35,000 feet to
its manufacturing facilities in
Lafayette, La., as part of its drive
to expand its presence in the
offshore oil and gas industry.
The new space houses braiding
equipment to produce the very
Above, a machine
for determining
the abrasion resistance of materials.
Samson works
closely with its
customers to help
them understand
how their specific
equipment and
operations affect
the useful life of
their lines.
41
Dr. Chou with
some of the
lines undergoing testing in
the company’s
R&D laboratory in Ferndale,
Wash. Samson
conducts an ongoing verification program to
assure that its
products meet
specifications
for quality and
consistency.
long, large-diameter synthetic ropes
that can replace the wire rope used
for mooring oil rigs.
While the work done by Chou
and his staff has helped the company
to grow, it also has great human and
environmental implications. As he
explained, the research and development helps Samson’s customers
accomplish three things: greater efficiency, improved safety and protection of the environment.
“We help companies make
more money and be more safe,”
Chou said.
The lines made by Samson
use DPX technology involving
high modulus polyethylene fiber
(HMPE). Its advantages are its
high strength and low weight (light
enough to float in water). Its drawbacks include its surface slickness
(“When you tie it to an H-bitt, it
slips.”) and limited resistance to
higher temperatures.
So Samson is constantly looking
for ways to make the ropes function better by doing such things as
using different fibers on the surface
of the lines to make them grip better, while improving their abrasion
and temperature resistance.
42
For example, the Quantum
series has an HMPE center and
a treated surface. That gives the
lines a fuzzy surface that greatly
improves its gripping qualities.
“That’s now the industry
norm,” Chou said.
Samson recently introduced a
coated line called Saturn-12 that
it says will increase the life of the
line by as much as 20 percent compared with other HMPE lines. The
12-strand line designed for use by
tugs has a patented coating that
improves abrasion resistance internally and externally, resulting in
longer life. It is suitable for use on
drums or the pendant of an escort
line. However, because the line is
slippery, it is not recommended for
use on H-bitts, capstans or cleats
because it might slip.
The typical life of a synthetic line
aboard a tug is about two years. A
key question facing any vessel operator using synthetic lines is when has
a line reached the point that it needs
to be retired.
As Chou observed, “Dyneema is
good stuff, but expensive.”
So there is a strong economic
incentive to keep using a line as long
as possible. But if a line is used for
too long, the consequences could be
catastrophic for the crewmembers of
a tug who would be at risk of serious injury or death from a line that
snaps. And were a line to snap while
a ship was under escort, an environmental disaster could ensue if the
ship went aground or was involved
in a collision that resulted in an oil
spill.
Samson uses its research facilities
to help its customers make good
decisions on retiring their lines —
decisions based on hard data that
will allow the vessel operators to get
optimal return on their investment
without endangering their employees
or the environment.
“It is almost impossible to derive
the life expectancy of a rope from
first principles,” Chou explained.
“Every application is different.”
So Samson works with individual
customers to determine just how
their lines are being used and how
they perform. That can include
onboard inspections that might turn
up things such as rough areas on a
bitt that are fraying the line. Samson
will also test the lines themselves to
see how they are holding up in a specific operation over time.
Once Samson has learned all
it can about a given operation, it
can provide guidance on how the
lines should be used and when they
should be retired.
“We work with customers on
retirement criteria, at what point do
we retire the rope,” Chou said. “We
don’t want the rope to break while
they are using it.”
Samson provides participating
companies data on which they can
make rational decisions about when
to retire a line.
The lines Samson sells, along with
the guidance the company provides,
allow customers to operate more efficiently and save money in the long
term, Chou said, but safety remains
of first importance.
“We generate a lot of knowledge about how to use a rope
safely,” he said.
So the science that Chou brings
to Samson helps him develop highperformance products, but it also
means taking a rigorous, quantitative
approach to operations and safety.
Or as he put it, “I’m responsible
for quality.” •
Professional Mariner February 2011