MacArtney strengthens sales in Australasia with the appointment of a new System Sales Manager
MacArtney, the leading supplier of underwater technology, has recruited Daniel Malone as System Sales Manager, based Perth WA, effective 1st December 2021.
Daniel brings a great deal of technical knowledge to our team in Asia and Australia, having comprehensive knowledge and hands-on experience in the Oil and Gas industry, specialising in geophysical surveys, seismic data acquisition, ROV and subsea operations.
Before moving to the commercial Oil and Gas sector, Daniel served in the British Royal Navy as a communication and weapons engineer. Furthermore, he is a qualified engineer, enabling him to bring a very high degree of technical detail to his dealings with customers.
Multi-skilled engineer with a focus on electronic/electrical engineering fundamentals
Having studied electronics and electrical engineering at Teesside University in the UK, he brings a high level of analytical, problem solving and fault rectification abilities in both the office and remote offshore environments.
In his new role as System Sales Manager, Daniel Malone will use his interpersonal and systematic skills to tackle the demanding issues that our clients have in Australia and New Zealand. With its geographical remoteness and time difference from Europe, they choose to deploy MacArtney products because of our long history of quality and reliability.
Daniels's main areas of responsibility will be day-to-day sales of MacArtney's systems product range and looking at areas for growth and expansion into academic and defence markets.
"I have used their products for many years in challenging and remote environments. I know their product quality and robustness as well as their after-sales support, so naturally, I jumped at the chance to get on board with MacArtney. I look forward to adding value here in Australia and promoting new business growth", Daniel says.
A bright future
Anthony Gleeson, Managing Director of MacArtney Singapore, is excited to welcome Daniel to the team:
"MacArtney is keen to grow its business in Australasia, and Daniel's background in the Offshore Oil and Gas, Renewables and Defence sectors can only enhance our client experience and help drive the company into new and existing areas and opportunities in the region."
MacArtney Australia Pty Ltd, established in 2012, represents the commitment of MacArtney Underwater Technology to the challenging underwater technology markets of Oceania. Located in the major offshore city of Perth, the operation provides a local professional presence within the region, supported by the long-established global MacArtney network.
MacArtney Australia provides an increased sales base with access to an extensive stock and capacity, resulting in the fast completion of projects and customer applications.
First Decommissioning Underway in Africa
Angola sees Africa’s first offshore oil platform decommissioning underway as EQS (Environment Quality Services) successfully deploys their Saab Seaeye Falcon for determining safer upcoming decommissioning operations.
Dubai-based EQS assess the integrity of offshore structures using their Falcon for visual inspection and image gathering.
The range of offshore structures inspected to assess integrity includes platform (jacket), wellhead, protection dome, pipelines and umbilical.
EQS help offshore energy clients navigate the complex environmental regulatory landscape to achieve regulatory compliance, protecting employee health and safety, and managing business liabilities.
“The Falcon supports EQS in their aim to fulfil specific works in a safe and cost-effective manner by delivering accurate and relevant information,” says Carlos Rodrigues (CTO) of EQS.
He sees the Falcon as an ideal resource for their specialist work as it can handle an array of cameras, sensors, tooling and complex data gathering systems that can easily be added or changed thanks to the Falcon’s iCON™ intelligent module-focused distributed control architecture.
The world’s top selling robot of its class, the Falcon’s 20-year success comes from being a portable, metre-sized, intelligent, powerful, five-thruster, highly maneuverable, multi-tasking, easy to use vehicle, depth rated range to 1000 metres.
With a reliability record covering over a million hours underwater, including deep tunnel work, the Falcon can remain stable in turbulent waters and strong currents whilst undertaking both robust and precision tasks.
For EQS the Falcon supports their wide range of complex and routine environmental projects where solutions are created by combining the right people with the right technologies to meet each project’s unique challenges.
ASL Introduces the AZFP6-ice, the Next Generation of Upward Looking Sonars for Ice-Infested Waters
ASL Environmental Sciences is pleased to announce the combining of our Acoustic Zooplankton Fish Profiler (AZFP) with our Ice Profiling Sonar (IPS) to provide a comprehensive solution for ice thickness detection and water column profiling of fish, zooplankton, bubbles and suspended sediments in ice-infested waters. The AZFP6-ice is the next generation in high resolution, low power, continuous recording subsurface instruments that are capable of long-term deployments of a year or more. The AZFP6-ice would typically be used in an upward looking taut-line mooring as illustrated below but could easily be inverted to record the water column in a downward looking orientation. Built into the ice profiling sensor is a logarithmic detector which resolves both strong and weak acoustic targets. In practice, this means that the signal from strong reflections such as the water–air interface at close range doesn’t saturate, and weak targets such as the water–ice interface at long range are still measurable.
A narrow-beam 420 kHz frequency channel on this Instrument (identical to the one used on ASL’s well-known IPS) is used for high spatial resolution ice cover measurements. The three other calibrated fishery acoustic channels of the instrument acquire details of constituent targets within the water column. The memory capacity of this new generation instrument has been upgraded from a single 32 GB compact flash card to the now expanded 512 GB capacity using dual 256 GB SD cards with plans to continue expanding memory capacity.
The first AZFP6-ice prototype with ice profiling capabilities was deployed in October 2021. ASL expects to formally launch this new instrument in the Spring of 2022.
The Polish Navy acquires iXblue DriX USV to advance its hydrographic operations
The Hydrographic Office of the Polish Navy has purchased iXblue DriX Uncrewed Surface Vehicle (USV) through the company’s local partner THESTA. The USV will be advancing the Polish Navy hydrographic capabilities.
An 8m USV developed to conduct various missions, DriX is particularly well suited for hydrographic surveys. Equipped with advanced sensors (radar, lidar, cameras…) and its own artificial intelligence, the USV analyzes its environment, avoids obstacles, and carries out its missions autonomously. With its efficient Launch and Recovery System, DriX can be launched from a vessel or can directly sail from a harbor to autonomously map large areas of the ocean in a reduced amount of time.
“The Hydrographic Office of The Polish Navy having led the way towards the adoption of autonomous solutions within the Polish Navy, we are honored that they turned to iXblue DriX USV as their next reliable and proven autonomous platform for their future bathymetric survey. By significantly increasing both the quality of the collected data and the survey area coverage, the use of this new Uncrewed Surface Vehicle will open up new possibilities for the Polish Hydrographic Office.” Cezary Majchrowicz, Technical Director at Thesta explained.
“We are honored by the choice of the Polish Navy to operate our DriX Uncrewed Survey Vessel for survey applications in the wake of other prestigious international hydrographic services and private companies in the world such as the US NOAA.” Commented Guillaume Eudeline, Global Business Development, Ships & Drones at iXblue. “Offering outstanding seakeeping and speed capabilities, Our DriX USV will act as a true force-multiplier and will help the Polish Navy acquire high quality data while optimizing their survey productivity, efficiency, safety and environmental footprint. We would like to thank them for their trust and are now looking forward to our continued partnership with them.”
SeeByte wins contract to develop enhanced situational awareness for future Active Protection Systems
Future Active Protection Systems (APS), and specifically Modular Integrated Protection Systems (MIPS) are likely to incorporate passive sensor subsystems as a crucial element of their sensing suite.
With advanced imaging processing techniques, passive imaging sensors could provide additional enhanced situational awareness (SA) capabilities, such as object detection, identification and tracking, and image segmentation and range estimation, whilst also providing their core APS function.
Under Phase 2 of DASA’s “Advanced Vision 2020 and Beyond” competition, run by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) and Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA), SeeByte will develop a state-of-the-art multi-task DNN framework. The multi-task architecture provides semantic image segmentation, object detection, and depth estimate (bearing and range) outputs for monocular electro-optics (EO/IR) sensors.
SeeByte’s previous experience with multi-task DNN architectures has demonstrated that it is possible to substantially compress DNN model size and complexity without a drop in performance.
In later phases SeeByte will also address limited imagery datasets containing relevant target objects by using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to inject synthetic objects into real imagery
Image: DASA has awarded contracts to develop improved Electro-Optics and Infrared (EOIR) sensor capability. DASA Copyright.
All-change for SUT elected officers + news of SUT award winners
This week’s AGM of the Society for Underwater Technology marked the official hand over to new elected officers in all senior posts – President, Chair, Hon Secretary and Hon Treasurer; the announcement of three new Fellows of the Learned Society; and of winners of three Awards, The President’s Award, the Lennard-Senior Award; and the Gwyn Griffiths Award for Underwater Robotics. Once all the formalities were concluded SUT members were treated to a fascinating talk on ‘eDNA: The future of ocean biodiversity monitoring’ by Dr Katie Cruickshanks of NatureMetrics.
The new officers
SUT’s Cheryl Burgess explained:
“By coincidence our Chair, David Saul; our Hon Secretary, Dave Brookes; and our Hon Treasurer Mick Cook had all reached the end of their permitted terms of office at the same time; and our President Judith Patten MBE has also stepped down after her year in office. We thank them all for their sterling service during unprecedented times. Both David Saul and Judith Patten will remain on SUT’s Council
“Moya Crawford is our new President; Sue John our first female Chair; Iain Knight takes on the role of Hon Secretary and Nigel Carey becomes Hon Treasurer – what a team!”
New Fellows of the SUT
Three new SUT Fellows have been elected:
- Simon Hems for services to the London and South of England Branch
- Steve Duffield for services to the Perth (Australia) Branch and SUT’s International Committee
- Rex Hubbard for services to the Perth Branch
Awards
The President’s Award 2021 was presented to John Howes, publisher and editor of UT2, and UV2 at an auspicious time. UT2 has recently reached a major milestone – 75 issues have been published since 2006. As the citation states:
“The President’s Award is made to John Howes, a great friend of the Society, the respected journalist, publisher and expert in the field of underwater technology in recognition of the years of service he has performed with, and for the SUT, its members and the wider industry.”
UT2 was one of the first magazines in the world to be produced for online publication and: “is not only a ‘go-to’ publication for its content, but visually is in a class of its own”. UV2 focuses on underwater vehicles and increasingly has video embedded which can also be found on the Subsea Video YouTube channel. John Howes also publishes old underwater-related photos on LinkedIn a service that has attracted over 17,000 followers and a host of comments which may in time lead to history qualification looking at ‘Subsea 1960 to the present’.
The Lennard-Senior Memorial Prize is awarded annually in memory of two of the original members of SUT’s Marine Renewable Energies Committee (MREC) – Don Lennard and Gordon Senior. This year’s winner (nominated by and voted for by members of MREC) is Neil Kermode, Managing Director of the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Orkney.
Neil won the inaugural award ten years ago in 2011 and “still – perhaps more than ever- deserves this accolade today..... EMEC has marine renewables at its core and has extended its reach, to great effect, to encompass hydrogen and energy systems..... Neil is a true champion of enabling the marine energy sector”. His Award will be officially presented at All-Energy 2022 in Glasgow in May 2022.
Attendees at the AGM were also made aware of the winner of the inaugural Gwyn Griffiths Award for Underwater Robotics – Aleksandra Tomaszek, co-founder of 1CSI Ltd (see press release issued 8 November https://tinyurl.com/42y5t8wb)
Full information on the SUT is available at www.sut.org. The Learned Society has both individual, corporate and student members. SUT Individual membership is £76 per year. To join visit https://www.sut.org/sut-membership/application-for-membership/ or e-mail [email protected].
LISST suspended particle size and concentration Systems for Rothamsted
Sequoia Scientific, Inc. has built and shipped 3 LISST-200X packages to be deployed by Rothamsted Research. Planet Ocean, the Distributor for Sequoia in the UK has worked closely with the end user staff to meet their technical and delivery needs.
The LISST-200X instrument harnesses laser diffraction to obtains in-situ measurements of particle size distribution, volume concentration, optical transmission, and the optical volume scattering function (VSF) at depths down to 600 meters. An accessory item installed on each of the LISST-200X units is a Bio Block anti-fouling shutter for reducing the effects of fouling during extended deployments.
When asked about the expected use, Rothamsted Research staff member states, “As part of one of its current strategic science programmes (Soil to Nutrition – funded by the UK Research and Innovation-Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council), Rothamsted Research, UK, is assembling a unique dataset on the effective particle size characteristics of the water-stable aggregates eroded from different land uses (peaty moorland, grassland, arable). In turn, these data, which are being assembled using the LISST (Laser In-Situ Scattering and Transmissometry) 200X, and being linked with experimental work by Canadian partners (University of Waterloo and the National Water Research Institute, Burlington) on the critical thresholds for erosion and deposition of sediment flocs in the aquatic environment. The overall aim is to understand the landscape scale propensity for the flocs originating from different land uses to be deposited and thereby contribute to more severe in-stream impacts on aquatic ecology and nutrient and contaminant transfers. More widely, the work is contributing to ongoing exploration and debate over the impacts of land use change that might occur in the UK as a result of a number of drivers including climate change forecasts, net zero aspirations and the changing dietary preferences of consumers.”
Following delivery of the 3 LISST-200X systems in just 2 weeks the team at Rothamsted Research benefited from training provided by Sequoia staff in the US, ensuring their ability to successfully operate and deploy the instruments.
Planet Ocean, the Sequoia Distributor based in country, has supported clients throughout Europe for years with an attentive staff and extensive knowledge base of applications and technology for the multidisciplined scientific community in the region.
https://www.sequoiasci.com/about/news/rothamsted-research-lisst-delivery/
#LISST #RothamstedResearch #PlantOcean #ParticleIntelligence #ScienceandEnvironment #Sediment
SEA-KIT strengthens fleet with new 12m USV to meet expected 2022 market demand
SEA-KIT International, an award-winning pioneer in the Uncrewed Surface Vessel sector, has announced plans to build another of its X-class, 12m USVs as a fleet vessel for launch in 2022.
This build, the sixth X-class to be constructed at the company’s Essex base, will pave the way for the company to meet increased market demand for unmanned vessels and to penetrate new sectors of the global maritime industry.
SEA-KIT CEO, Ben Simpson, commented:
“Our X-class USV has changed very little since we won the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE with USV ‘Maxlimer’ back in 2015. The fact that this will be the sixth build of this class is testament to its robust and now well proven design. We want to continue to push boundaries in other sectors of the maritime industry and this new addition to our fleet will enable us to demonstrate the benefits of uncrewed vessel technology to new markets.”
From the outset, SEA-KIT has positioned itself as being sharply focused on driving down the environmental impact and cost of geo-data collection. This latest build is set to be even more versatile and fuel efficient than its predecessors, with the potential for three different propulsion packages within one hull: diesel-electric, hybrid and hydrogen hybrid.
SEA-KIT is currently leading a Clean Maritime Demonstration Competition funded project to demonstrate zero emission maritime operations using a hydrogen fuel cell manufactured by Bramble Energy. The silent running and low vibration that can be achieved with hydrogen propulsion enables highly sensitive acoustic devices and sensors to monitor underwater environments more efficiently and with minimal disturbance, a huge benefit for activities such as marine mammal observation.
Ben Simpson continued: “Interest in SEA-KIT’s designs is increasing now that we have vessels operating on commercial offshore projects globally and we are keen to develop new strategic partnerships to build our client base. With the launch of this vessel, we will be able to offer tailored capability demonstrations as well as charter options and additional services from next summer. It opens the door for customers to order zero emission vessels as the industry collaboratively works towards its net zero goals.”
Greensea Creates a Dedicated User Interface Team
Greensea invests in its mission to improve the relationship between operators and robots
Greensea Systems, creator of OPENSEA®, the universal open architecture software platform for the marine industry, has announced the creation of a dedicated user interface team. This team will be instrumental in making Workspace, its flagship user interface, more streamlined and operator focused.
To support its mission to develop technology that improves the relationship between operators and robots, Greensea has invested in the creation of a new development team focused entirely on improving the operator experience within Workspace. The User Interface Team will be led by Brian Crist, a veteran Greensea developer. Brian will be joined by Mike Wieliczki, Senior Software Developer. They will be joined by two new team members: Zack Forsythe, User Experience Designer; and Ben Rickman, User Interface Developer. While the team will have a focused role, its individual team members will be joining ongoing project teams to advocate for user experience and the implementation of UI improvements in Workspace.
“I’m thrilled to be working with a dedicated team of such creative and talented individuals.” says Brian Crist, Engineering Team Lead. “Having a collaborative team will allow us to move UI development along at a much more rapid pace and will let us provide a clean, intuitive and state of the art user experience that matches the power and reliability of the rest of OPENSEA.”
In November, Greensea brought the user interface team together to meet face-to-face for the first time and for Brian to bring the new members up to speed with an intensive three day deep dive into the backend systems that power Workspace.
This focused team will help to make the Workspace UI better for all of our customers, and most importantly for operators in the field.
Greensea continues to expand its workforce. Interested parties can monitor job openings at greensea.com/careers.
Ashtead Technology bolsters rental fleet with investment in iXblue technologies
International subsea equipment rental and solutions specialist Ashtead Technology has further strengthened its rental fleet with a significant investment in iXblue subsea navigation systems.
The investment includes the addition of further Rovins and Rovins Nano inertial navigation systems as well as Octans attitude and heading reference systems which are now available to rent throughout the company’s nine international technology and service hubs.
Based on fibre-optic gyroscope technology, iXblue navigation solutions have become a standard in the offshore industry. Equipping over 80% of the subsea vehicles used in the energy and geoscience industries, iXblue inertial navigation systems and attitude and heading reference systems are accurate and maintenance-free, offering unrivalled performance and power, with robust navigation for remotely operated vehicles and autonomous underwater vehicles.
Ross MacLeod, Ashtead Technology’s Technical Director, said:
“For 36 years, we have built a strong track record as a market leader in the provision of subsea equipment rental and solutions across the offshore energy sector. This latest investment of iXblue equipment is a direct result of listening to our customers’ requirements and ensuring we have the broadest and most technologically advanced subsea equipment from leading manufacturers to support our customers’ projects worldwide."
Maverick Piccininni, iXblue’s, Regional Sales Manager, said:
“It is great to see the ongoing support and investment from Ashtead Technology which is testimony to our long-term partnership. It also demonstrates Ashtead Technology's commitment to leading edge technology and innovative solutions that brings robust performance, safety, reliability and differentiation to their customers".
So far this year, Ashtead Technology has invested £8million in new subsea equipment and technology to expand its extensive equipment rental fleet, further strengthening its position in the offshore energy subsea equipment rental sector. The company has also increased its workforce by 36 taking employee headcount to 206.