The world’s population continues to grow. We’re consuming more, using more energy, depleting more of the planet’s resources. Balancing these needs is a massive challenge. It means changing how we live and work.
At Sonardyne, we’re dedicated to supporting you, our customers, across the energy spectrum in addressing this challenge; from how we operate as a business to the solutions we provide, says Edd Moller, our new Head of Energy.
A lot has changed over the past few years, not least during the last 15 months. Restrictions imposed by the Coronavirus pandemic have meant many plans to adopt remote operations, digital twins and advanced analytics, have been accelerated. The spotlight on climate change is also making us all look a lot more closely at the energy system we inhabit and how we can operate within it more sustainably.
Efforts to reduce emissions have been redoubled, reinforcing and accelerating ever-higher targets – and even changing entire business models. We’re all now on the energy transition pathway, one way or another.
Here at Sonardyne, we started on both pathways a number of years ago – both in how we run our business, investing in low energy systems at our headquarters, for example, and in the products and services we provide.
We’re building on a deep heritage across the marine industry. Over the past five decades we’ve been supporting underwater operations, we’ve constantly been seeking ways to allow you to do things more efficiently; whether that’s increasing the capabilities of our individual instruments, which we’ve been doing since we launched the company in 1971, or allowing you to remotely operate our systems, via crewed or uncrewed surface and underwater vehicles – bringing to life the new era of remote operations centres.
Today, balancing the world’s energy needs with our impact on our climate, means we have a challenge on all fronts. In the offshore oil and gas industry, which has been the driving force for most of our past technology development, we need to support the decarbonisation effort. We will still need oil and gas for some years to come, as an energy source and for day-to-day products, but it needs to be produced and used in the lowest emission way possible. That means doing more remotely, to reduce the carbon footprint of operations, but also taking CO₂ out of the system by de-risking carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects. We’re already supporting these efforts and I’ll continue to coordinate and prioritise these efforts.
Supporting a rapid acceleration in offshore renewable energy
But by far the largest challenge is to support the rapid acceleration of offshore renewable energy (ORE) development and we’re playing our part here too. Our technology is already supporting further growth in the offshore renewable energy industry.
Whether that’s providing accurate subsea tracking of seabed mapping sensors to ensure a fixed wind farm is installed on stable footings or monitoring floating platform mooring lines to maximise their working life, or enabling navigation and acoustic communications for controlling fleets of uncrewed underwater and surface inspection and maintenance vehicles, our technologies are enabling smarter offshore renewable energy operations.
But there’s still work to be done. With countries globally setting tens of gigawatt targets for offshore wind roll out, and many now focusing on the scaling up and cost reduction of floating offshore wind, there’s a big challenge and a big opportunity.
We’re ready for it and we’re ready to support you and our wider customer base across the whole energy spectrum. Not only that, it’s our 50th year as a company and we’re looking to the future, which includes setting our own target for carbon neutrality by 2025, laying the foundations for another successful 50 years.
I hope you’ll agree, it’s a very exciting time to be working in the energy industry!
The 21st century battlespace is complex. It’s multi-domain, it’s multi-threat and it’s not always obvious open, armed conflict. The underwater battlespace embodies all of these challenges to an increasingly significant degree. It’s a space that’s pivotal to protecting critical national infrastructure and safeguarding maritime trade.
But it’s also a challenging place to operate, whether that’s in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, mine hunting capability or command and control. It’s also a space where the threats are proliferating, from advances in antisubmarine warfare through to asymmetric actors, crewed, uncrewed, small and autonomous.
Working between all these actors – be it different platforms, domains and nations – in the underwater theatre is an even bigger challenge. It requires interoperability and that means the need for assets across domains and nations to talk to each other. A new standard in underwater communications is needed to meet these needs.
Sonardyne has been leading a technical programme to develop a high-integrity secure waveform for acoustic communications, set up in response to a Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) requirement. The work, funded by the UK Ministry of Defence, via Dstl, and primed by Thales UK, seeks to develop Phorcys, an open standard for secure acoustic communications that will enable navies to collaborate and interoperate, assuring secure transmissions and communications. Alexander Hamilton, Principal Communications Scientist at Dstl, and Ioseba Tena, Head of Defence at Sonardyne, discussed what this means.
Supporting anti-submarine operations
“One of the big problems at the moment is interoperability,” says Hamilton. “There needs to be a secure, high-performance protocol for anyone and everyone to use. We need secure, interoperable communications to underpin command, control and communications, to do mine countermeasures and mine hunting, to support anti-submarine operations.
“Underwater communications is a critical enabler, to take an example it’s key to enable things like the Future Commando Force advanced autonomous force. We need to work collaboratively, to achieve interoperability between the UK and its allies, but also multi-domain integration of underwater assets where they are able to connect to a wider mission network. But to enable all this we need the underwater battlespace to have secure, resilient, underwater communications.”
Tena says, “We already have open standards, take for instance JANUS. This was designed as the first interoperable protocol; the first step towards interoperability. I guess the missing ingredient with JANUS and other standards has been security.”
Secure and resilient underwater communications
Hamilton explains, “Yes. That’s right. The difference is having a secure and reliable protocol stack and there’s a difference between resilience and security. Security is about having confidentiality, integrity and availability. Resilience speaks to integrity and availability, but doesn’t necessarily provide that confidentiality.
“Traditional acoustic communications in the commercial domain are resilient, with high availability and high performance, but while commercial-off-the-shelf systems allow interoperability, they result in vendor lock-in. Furthermore, they’re also not inherently secure. And while existing protocol stacks can have security added on, AES-256 encryption for example has been applied to JANUS, this adds overheads and is outside of the protocol stack. It’s not a secure by design approach. We want to have high performance communications to support fast information transfer across the underwater battlespace. We also need security.”
Introducing Phorcys
“It’s the development of a high-performance protocol stack that will be available as an unclassified (non-protectively marked) standard,” says Hamilton. “It’s a secure-by-design approach using cryptographic keys, not just security by obscurity. We’re working with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) on that to ensure security of these communications is approved to government standards. Adhering to the standard will allow for multi-domain integration across different assets, interoperability between different nations, platforms and areas within the navy. That’s because, by using cryptographic keying approaches, unless you have the key, you can’t get access to the network and you maintain the security of your communications. A third party wouldn’t be able to understand the content of what was being transmitted. Tena points out, “Cryptographic keys also accommodate different levels of interoperability. A UK platform with UK codes will only communicate securely with another UK platform with UK codes. A UK platform could also have NATO codes, to communicate with a NATO platform, or a US platform might have NATO codes, etc. “
“That’s the aim. In fact, the standard will be unclassified; it’s the key that defines which users have access to the information. That means there can also be a zero code that’s open to all.” Hamilton explains.
Situational awareness – recognising friend from foe
“Going forward, an important part of Phorcys will also be about enabling situation awareness between these underwater assets; being able to challenge and recognise friend from foe. In the future, during an operation in a busy seaway, it will become increasingly important to recognise your autonomous vehicle returning to a mother ship from an incoming autonomous torpedo.”
As part of the Phorcys programme, Sonardyne experts are collaborating with Newcastle University to design a waveform capable of working across different frequency bands in order to target all environments, from confined spaces to deep, open waters.
“Phorcys is exciting because it will allow for interoperability between different platforms across the entire underwater battlespace as it will operate at different frequency bands,” says Hamilton. “If you want longer range, you might use lower frequencies. For small unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) operations, you might want to use one of the frequency bands at 20 to 28 kHz. It allows you to control UUVs with higher degree of fidelity. It allows you to get more data back, and provides assured command and control across your assets and fast data transfer. Because it’s being developed as a standard, there will be lower cost of development and a shorter time to deploy,” says Hamilton.
Open, interoperable standards
So what are Sonardyne’s plans for the technology? “Sonardyne intends to implement this standard and work with third parties to promote its use,” says Tena. Our aim, on completion of this project, will be to continue to offer our customers our commercial-off-the-shelf solutions, built on our commercially leading and robust Wideband digital signal heritage and expertise, as well as the opportunity to work with secure Phorcys waveforms using the same hardware platforms.
“We want vendor buy-in, not vendor lock-in. It will simplify procurement, because vendor systems that comply to the standard can be used together and there’s still space for companies to compete,” says Hamilton. “It opens up a different market space; it opens up competition on hardware and processing, optimising size, weight and power, for small UUVs, for example.
“It will also open up innovation higher up the protocol stack, in swarm autonomy behaviours, for example. Rather than being focused on communications, developers can focus on application and platform integration, layer processing, autonomy and graphic user interfaces into the network.
“Because the protocol will be unclassified, the work we’re doing will also be available to other industries to use. The oil and gas industry, for example, could use it as part of their underwater robotics operations, ensuring the security of their data.”
If you are interested in Phorcys and Sonardyne’s plans please don’t hesitate to contact our team: [email protected].
Oceanographic instrumentation developed by Sonardyne to monitor ocean currents has been acquired by the University of Rhode Island following its successful use in a US$2 million project in the US Gulf of Mexico.
The project, led by the University of Rhode Island (URI), saw an array of specialist sensors, including Sonardyne’s Pressure Inverted Echo Sounders (PIES), deployed for two years, to monitor the hugely disruptive Gulf Loop Current.
Sonardyne’s PIES were installed in waters down to 3,500 m depth early in 2019, to help better understand the current. Following successful wireless acoustic data harvesting campaigns from the instruments in 2019 and 2020, their deployment was extended to the end of May, this year.
Funding for the project, from the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS), was also extended, allowing URI to purchase the Sonardyne PIES used on the project outright, as well as a Dunker 6 telemetry transceiver, for wireless data harvesting from the instruments when they are on the seafloor. This will allow URI to use the instruments on its future projects.
The Gulf Loop Current system is a highly energetic ocean circulation feature that influences all ocean processes in the Gulf and is characterised by disruptive Loop Eddy events that have serious impacts on a wide range of human and natural activities, from oil exploration to coastal eco-systems. However, knowledge of its underlying dynamics has been limited, leading to this study, led by Kathleen Donohue, Project Director and Professor of Oceanography at URI.
PIES work by transmitting an acoustic pulse from an instrument on the seabed upwards. The pulse is reflected off the water-air boundary at the sea surface and returns back down to the seabed where it is detected by the PIES. This enables an exact measurement of the two way signal travel time to be calculated. At the same instant, an accurate measurement of depth is made using highly precise internal pressure sensors.
Combining data from an array of PIES instruments and near bottom current meters with historic water profile data can be used to calculate currents throughout the full water column over an extended area – in this case totalling over 50,000 sq km. For this project, Sonardyne enhanced the instruments with an integrated single point current meter, tethered above the units, leading to a modified designation as CPIES.
Randy Watts, Professor of Oceanography at URI, says, “The ability to receive the full time series of measurements plus engineering-performance checks via acoustic telemetry in 2019 and 2020 shows that the data are of high quality. The impressively low battery drain meant we could leave the CPIES untouched on the sea floor for the duration of our experiment. With the additional funding, we were also able to extend our observational window to nearly two years. This is important because each Loop Current Eddy formation is unique.”
“The Loop Current encounters different pre-existing eddies and different bottom topography in different locations with different inflow from the Caribbean and different wind fields,” says Professor Donohue. “These events inside the ocean are dynamically analogous to ‘weather’ and ‘storms’ in the atmosphere – and every bit as varied. Observing these many events and observing the full water column is highly valuable information to guide the forecast models.”
“Looking to the future, the telemetry capabilities of Sonardyne’s CPIES offer us an established way to collect the data at more frequent time intervals using an uncrewed surface vehicle (USV) and report it ashore to enable real-time forecasting of the entire Gulf of Mexico Loop Current System,” adds Professor Watts.
“URI have long been recognised as a leading proponent of using PIES to undertake large scale studies of ocean currents. Our collaboration with them has consequently taken our PIES technology to a new level, which we’re pleased to see being used in this important study. We look forward to continuing our close relationship with URI, including supporting more autonomous harvesting of their data.” Geraint West, Business Development Manager – Oceanographic, at Sonardyne
URI’s LCS study is being funded by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Gulf Research Programme, which was founded in 2013, as part of the legal settlements with companies involved in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The long-term objective is to improve forecasts of the Loop Current in order to increase the safety of operations in the Gulf.
Marine technology equipment supplier Sonardyne is aiming to become carbon neutral by the end of 2025, making it the first company of its type in the UK subsea industry to publicly announce such an ambitious target.
The goal covers direct and indirect emissions, including those associated with manufacturing as well as supply chain activities, from its UK sites and operations. It cements Sonardyne’s long-term commitment to being an environmentally responsible and sustainable business, with a clear goal towards supporting the Paris Agreement on climate change to limit global warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The target will be guided by and certified to PAS 2060, the internationally accepted standard for carbon neutrality.
[blockquote author=” Graham Brown, Managing Director, Sonardyne”]”Sonardyne recognises the need for sustainable use of energy to mitigate climate impact and degradation of the environment for the preservation of future generations. Working to achieve PAS 2060 will help us clearly demonstrate our commitment to our employees, supply chain and communities where we operate. We all have a role to play in recognising and supporting the need for sustainable use of energy to mitigate climate change. Sonardyne have supported five decades of responsible operations on and under the world’s oceans and seas. As we begin our next 50 years, sustainability and the environment will be an even greater focus for us.”[/blockquote]
Sonardyne’s heritage is in underwater technology innovation; supplying underwater communication, navigation, positioning, imaging and monitoring technologies and services across energy, defence, and science. While the company has always made every effort to limit waste and damage to the environment, for the past five years, reducing energy consumption has been made a key priority.
Last year, Sonardyne invested heavily in roof-mounted solar arrays across its headquarters in Hampshire, covering an area equivalent to 13 tennis courts. The company also uses air source heat pumps, is ISO 50001 Energy Management System certified and has had a Building Management System installed for a number of years, helping it to make the most efficient use of energy for heating and power. Any further energy requirements are purchased from a certified renewable energy supplier.
Additional measures being considered to take it towards PAS 2060 include investment in large-scale batteries and grid services. These will benefit the company’s access to and cost of renewable energy. They will also provide additional storage to the wider grid. For areas that cannot be decarbonised any other way, the company will support high quality certified carbon offsetting schemes.
In addition to its investments in energy efficiency across its facilities, Sonardyne has been leading uncrewed and over-the-horizon technology development and adoption. This enables its customers users to realise major reductions in the use of energy-intensive crewed vessels, while also reducing risk to personnel and cost.
Edward Moller, Head of Market for Energy at Sonardyne, says, “Sonardyne’s earliest projects were in support of the offshore energy industry and it’s always been with a view of making operations easier, safer and more cost-efficient. That usually equates to doing more with less, both in terms of efficient technology to reduce operational time and physically, by performing the same task but with less equipment. Today is no different, except that our goals, like many of our customers, across renewables and oil and gas, are also aligned with the energy transition. The energy sector has the biggest role to play in this transition and we’re here to support it.”
Ioseba Tena, Head of Market for Defence, says, “Many of the world’s naval forces now see climate change as a threat to their strategic objectives. New commitments to meet net zero emissions add additional layers of complexity to the role of defending national interests in the already challenging underwater environment. That is why I am proud that we will continue to build lasting, best-in-class equipment and, in a few short years, these will be built with net zero emissions. This will be one less headache for our customers.”
Geraint West, Head of Market for Science at Sonardyne, says, “Climate change is a pressing global issue, which the world’s leading ocean research institutes and organisations have been leading the way in understanding. Having worked with many of them over several decades, we’re really aware that we need to play our part in reducing the carbon footprint of their research activities. As well as committing to PAS 2060, we’re also partnering the United Nations’ Decade of Ocean Science and we look forward to supporting the UN’s Climate Change Conference (COP 26) here in the UK later this year.”
Maritime defence technology company Sonardyne and uncrewed maritime systems (UMS) software experts SeeByte have been awarded UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) funding to enhance and extend the future operational capability of autonomous and remotely operated systems in challenging battlespace domains.
The collaboration is the second phase of the UK’s Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA)’s Autonomy in Challenging Environments competition and builds on the work both organisations undertook in Phase 1.
Sonardyne advanced underwater positioning system will be teamed with SeeByte’s adaptive, communication-aware, robotic behaviour developed for their autonomy system Neptune to allow the UMS to operate in highly complex, variable and communications-limited environments. Automatic target recognition imagery snippets will be transferred acoustically using SeeByte’s novel semantic compression software.
As part of the project, Sonardyne and SeeByte will be using surface and underwater assets from Project Wilton, a recently formed maritime autonomous systems (MAS) team based out of HM Naval Base Clyde. The collaboration will culminate in a series of in-water demonstrations at Project Wilton facilities in the UK.
Sonardyne will install a Mini-Ranger 2 underwater positioning system onboard Project Wilton’s ARCIMS uncrewed surface vessel (USV) and AvTrak 6 Nano telemetry and tracking transceivers to the team’s Iver 3 autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), which will be managed by SeeByte’s autonomous networked acoustic communications system.
In addition, Sonardyne’s SPRINT-Nav instrument will also be integrated with the ARCIMS USV to provide an independent navigation reference in GNSS-denied environments.
Teamed with SeeByte’s adaptive, communication-aware, robotic behaviour developed for their autonomy system Neptune, the UMS will be able to operate in highly complex, variable and communications-limited environments. Automatic target recognition imagery snippets will be transferred acoustically using SeeByte’s novel semantic compression software.
This project will enable optimal uncrewed underwater vehicle (UUV) distribution for improved subsea communications and navigation in a range of challenging environments.
Ioseba Tena, Head of Defence at Sonardyne said, “Collaborative autonomy is part of the maritime defence road map. We need to enable more robots and have fewer operators in the underwater battlespace. Working alongside leaders in autonomy development like SeeByte, to make that vision a reality, as part of the Autonomy in Challenging Environments competition, is a significant step towards that goal.”
DASA’s Autonomy in Challenging Environments competition is funded through the UK Ministry of Defence’s Chief Scientific Adviser’s Research Programme’s Autonomy Incubator project. Awards are made by DASA on behalf of Dstl.
The Autonomy Incubator project aims to: Identify and develop underpinning research and technologies to support the development and fielding of unmanned systems across defence. This work can be matured through the wider Dstl Autonomy Programme and other research and development programmes.
Dstl delivers high-impact science and technology for the UK’s defence, security and prosperity. Dstl is an Executive Agency of the MOD with around 4,000 staff working across four sites; Porton Down, near Salisbury, Portsdown West, near Portsmouth, Fort Halstead, near Sevenoaks, and Alverstoke, near Gosport.