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North East Coast, USA
Shallow water presents a uniquely challenging environment for trenching vehicles and positioning is critical in the safe execution of trenching projects. Sulmara was commissioned by our windfarm client in the Northeast US to deliver trenching survey support for inter-array and export cables coming to shore.
Over the four months of this project, Sulmara supported the operation of the XLX WROV c/w dual head R2Sonic 2024 utilising the TSS440 as product tracking sensor.
Sulmara established that by using augmented positioning by exploiting the dynamics of a tracked vehicle and incorporating telemetry into a specially designed positioning program, a trencher position can be determined even during the periods without an acoustic position update.
This was the perfect solution when operating in the very short current windows.
When the USBL update is lost this risk increases. Sulmara saw a better way and the suite of tools built in response to this continuing problem whilst at sea was the solution to resolving the problems.
It gave a clearer picture of data to allow the positioning to be more accurate and therefore adjustments could be made in response to the data avoiding any problematic changes in course.
The system has improved the safety case for shallow water trenching operations using larger assets closer to the shore, maximising the operational windows per day and enabled the client to work closer to the beach and reduce the overall trenching duration. The Helix trenching team were continually complimentary at how stable positioning was throughout the project compared to incumbent methods.
