Aquablast Ltd was established in the United Kingdom in 1987 at Great Yarmouth in Norfolk
in response to demand from major oil exploration companies like BP-Amoco, Conoco and Shell
for environmentally-friendly surface preparation techniques.
Aquablast pioneered the use of Ultra High Pressure water blasting at operating pressures over
35,000 psi in the UK North Sea offshore oil and gas industry. Damage and pollution from dry
abrasive blasting systems was a major problem on offshore oil and gas installations and the UHP
water surface preparation technique, which could expose the original blast profile to white metal
standard, went on to become an industry standard.
Early work with UHP on board vessels at sea with riding crews saw the water-based technology used
for deck and Existing ballast tank re-coating projects and this led to the establishment of Aquablast
Hellas in Piraeus and Aquablast Romania in Constanza on the Black Sea.
Aquablast has designed and manufactured a series of surface preparation systems and
application tools intended to reduce environmental impact and make blasting and recoating activities more
efficient. The company has twice won UK Department of Trade and Industry “SMART” awards (Small Firms Awards
for Research and Technology)
The Aquablaster system of low volume wet abrasive blasting has made provided a low-cost
eco-friendly solution where the creation of a new surface profile is essential.
Aquablaster has wide operating parameters and can be used on anything from the heaviest
coatings applied to steel to work as delicate as cleaning old timber or soft stonework
to removing gel coats from glass-reinforced plastic (GRP) boat hulls.
One of the company's recent developments is Superstripper - an Aquablast patent-pending
development to permit the Aquablaster wet abrasive system performance to be boosted by 50%
by injecting UHP water.
Aquablast has close alliances with Kamat Pumpen GmbH of Witten Germany and is licensed
to assemble and service the wide range of famously reliable triplex pumps which Kamat have produced since 1974.
Kamat pumps are very well known in the process pump and high pressure water jetting industries.
More recently, Aquablast has been installing 55,000 psi (3,800 bar) UHP pump systems
aboard new vessels in partnership with the Minneapolis-based intensifier manufacturer
Jet Edge Corporation. In addition to using UHP for general maintenance on older vessels,
owners of multi-million dollar assets such as ULCC's (Ultra Large Crude Carrier) and similar
vessels, are realising the paybacks which can be achieved by carrying out high quality surface
preparation at sea.
The major paint manufacturers have endorsed all these water-based techniques and pictorial
references for both preparation standards and flash rust allowances are now widely available
from the paint manufacturers and the industry professional organisations.
Both Aquablast UHP and wet abrasive systems have wide applications in many other industries
including nuclear decontamination; building cleaning and renovation; refinery heat exchanger
cleaning; concrete hydro-demolition and abrasive water jet "cold cutting"
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