Awards

Best Paper Award 2016, Dredging Contractors of America and Western Dredging Association; ‘On The Relation Of Maximum Ball Passage And Recirculation Losses In Dredge Pumps’; Slager K, Winkelman MO; WODCON 21, 2016

Expertise

Mark is interested in everything that is in contact with soil water mixture. From the excavation process to the discharge area. The physical processes, the behaviour, the monitoring and control and the effects on the equipment. Primarily, the focus was on the dredge pump, the pump drive and the instrumentation.
Now, more emphasis is put on the cutting process. First in a cutterhead innovation project for the next generation of CSD’s for Damen. Currently, doing a PhD. project at the TU Delft, to research the behaviour of highly plastic sticky clay on the face of the teeth of a cutter head. This involves an analytical approach (specifically: slip lines method) of the clay behaviour, comparing this with FEM en DEM models and checking various parameters and models with experimental validation.

Biography

Mark graduated in 1998 at the Delft University of Technology, on the improvement of an environmental auger dredge in Sweden. His first job was as a dredge design engineer at DWE, a shipyard in Germany. In 2002 he started working for Damen Dredging Equipment as a project manager engineering. As projects and product development gradually became more complex he initiated the research and development department in Nijkerk, cooperating closely with universities and other partners. e.g. the ¡VAMOS! project for the development of an alternative mining system in the Horizons 2020 program. Mark is involved in strategic development programs, research coordination and the dissemination of knowledge on dredging through teaching and articles. As from 2022, Mark started a PhD project at the TU Delft for researching the physical processes in the cutting of clay.

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