Innovation Dialog Resulted in Innovation Project

Once again our Innovation Dialogs have resulted in a large innovation project with partial funding from the Research Council of Norway. Kongsberg Seatex will lead the project with a total budget in excess of 20 million Norwegian Kroner. The aim is to develop next minutes wave and vessel motion prediction tools for more efficient offshore crane operations.

Today, the weather limitations are too dominating for offshore vessel and subsea operations. Typically,in the winter, the operability of subsea operations is only about 30 per cent. The most limiting factor is offshore crane operations.

A team lead by Kongsberg Seatex aims to develop active real-time decision support based on real time measurements and next minutes waves and motions predictions. The most important factor is to be able to give a warning of large incoming waves for the next five minutes. Then a decision can be taken whether to start a “lift off” from deck or not, or to continue, or stop, a critical subsea operation. Typically, only by increasing the limitation on maximum wave heights by 0.5 meters the waiting time might be reduced from one week to one day.

The project team includes a subsea operator, crane supplier, and offshore vessel owner, as well as Uni Research Polytec, Uni Research Computing, MARINTEK and MIT Ocean Research, as R&D partners.

- The new project gives us the opportunity to demonstrate the real value potential of our high precision sensor technology, says Arne Rinnan, CTO of Kongsberg Seatex AS. We are really looking forward to working together with a team of leading partners to solve some of the most challenging problems in offshore crane operations.

Improvements are Already to be Implemented

Uni Research Polytec has been active in arranging several Innovation Dialogues both in Haugesund and in Bergen, supported by, and in collaborations with GCE Subsea and VRI funding from Hordaland County.

- Two years ago, a first R&D project “Development of Decision Support System for Crane Operations”, with Deepocean in Haugesund as project owner was established , says Svein O. Halstensen, Leader Maritime Technology of Uni Research Polytec.

Last month, the Kongsberg Seatex VMM200 system was installed on Edda Freya to analyse vessel motion and weather data. Marintek and Kongsberg Seatex are already developing new models and functionalities for decision support for crane operations in the VMM200 system.

- Ocean wave dynamics is the main challenge for all operations. Real-time accurate wave and vessel motion prediction for active decision-making will increase the efficiency of all kind of operations both on sea surface, through the wave zone, and below sea surface, i.e. subsea. Both a competence project and more “spin-off” projects are to follow, says Svein O. Halstensen.

We are very happy with the collaboration with GCE Subsea and VRI to facilitate workshops to bring industry and R&D partners closer together to solve real problems and establish projects according to the most important needs of the industry. We very much look forward to the continuation of our collaboration, Halstensen concludes.

More to Come

Our most recent innovation dialogue was related to autonomous inspection of subsea pipelines 15 December. – This was again a very good meeting place to share ideas and initiate new collaborations project, says Jon O. Hellevang, Senior Subsea Innovator GCE Subsea. GCE Subsea is continuously assisting members and partners to realise their project ideas – We very much look forward to take ideas from this, and other workshops, further in 2017, says Hellevang.

GCE Subsea will continue our activity and support to develop more effective subsea operations. As one example Simsea has been awarded pre-project funding from GCE Subsea to develop more efficient simulation tools for offshore operations, Hellevang finishes.

Together with Simsea we are arranging a seminar and workshop in Haugesund 9 February 2017, with simulation of subsea operations as topic – go to the event calendar.