• Dynamic Positioning Matrix

The Dynamic Positioning Matrix

Offshore vessels operate within all the segments of the Sonardyne Matrix®: Exploration, Ocean Science, Telecommunications, Drilling, Construction, Pipeline, Asset Management, Maritime Security and Decommissioning. Aside from the more common ship types, many vessels are designed to undertake very specific roles. These include: pipelaying vessels, seismic vessels, ROV support vessels, dive support vessels and mobile drilling units.

Sonardyne's acoustic and inertial technology is installed on a global fleet of vessels, providing accurate surface and subsea positioning in all ocean depths.

Fast Position Updates

6G® USBL and LUSBL systems are designed to track targets simultaneously to ranges of greater than 6,000 metres. They support a wide range of industry standard DP telegrams and are compatible with a wide range of transponders. These systems also incorporate unique 'ping stacking' technology, offering fast position update rates, independent of water depth.

6G® USBL systems have the ability to become aware of other acoustic systems by monitoring the frequency band. This allows the system to be aware of potential conflicts from parallel operations and mitigate for them.

Sonardyne 6G® USBL transceivers are designed to optimise performance in the harsh environment in which they operate. The 6G® standard transceiver is an all purpose unit proven for general DP operations where tracking could be at shallow angles or straight up and down. For high noise environments, large array transceivers optimised to receive signals arriving within a ±50° cone are ideally suited. Any noise generated outside of this area, for example by thrusters, is attenuated. This has been proven to allow accurate positioning of the noisiest vessels.

 

Acoustically Aided INS

Sonardyne's Lodestar inertial technology provides some significant advantages for DP applications. Firstly it provides more precise USBL positioning. Secondly it senses the vessel's true motion and with aiding from the USBL derived vessel position it outputs smoothed vessel position at a higher output rate. This GPS-independent real vessel motion into the DP desk reduces fuel costs, smoothes through short term acoustic outages and enables transponder battery life to be increased.

 

LUSBL

In a major effort to reduce vessel time, Sonardyne's 6G® LUSBL DP reference system can utilise a single array on the seabed that can now be deployed and fully maintained by a DP drilling vessel.

With Wideband® 2, the precision of the acoustic ranges is dramatically better than narrow band signals enabling much smaller distances between the array transponders on the seabed whilst still maintaining the same precision. This enables the arrays to be deployed and maintained by the drill vessel's own ROV, all without moving the vessel.

Long life 6G® transponders are now available that enable a transponder array to be semi-permanently pre-laid around specific drill locations and utilised for many years by a single vessel.