— Latest Customers Reaffirm GAPS and POSIDONIA High-Precision Advantage in South China Sea Offshore Oil&Gas Operation and Ultra-deep water South African Salvage.
iXBlue, a global leader in navigation, positioning, and imaging solutions, is celebrating a major sales milestone for its acoustic products, more than 250 USBL systems since the introduction of POSIDONIA (very-long-range USBL) in 1999 and GAPS (pioneering single-enclosure USBL-INS) in 2004. iXBlue other acoustic solutions include RAMSES (Synthetic-LBL), ComMet (Metrology), and OCEANO transponder range. Latest 4th-generation GAPS, with L/USBL and DP features, was delivered to SapuraAcergy SdnBhd (“SapuraAcergy”), an engineering and construction contractor, specializing in deep-water installation, decommissioning, and conventional activities for the Oil&Gas industry in Asia Pacific region. POSIDONIA latest customer is Deep Ocean Search (DOS), a Survey and Recovery Company, with very deep water salvage applications, off the coast of South Africa and elsewhere.
SapuraAcergy needed USBL with higher accuracy than their old versions and inertial-acoustic systems for DP and ROV positioning. GAPS is installed on the Sapura-3000, a deepwater heavy lift and pipe-laying vessel. iXBlue ROVINS provides robust high-quality positioning, attitude sensing and data processing at a very high-rate of 200Hz, qualities critical for long layback pipelay operation. According to Robbert Veldkamp, Senior Survey Engineer of SapuraAcergy, “Precise tracking in shallow waters is always a challenge. SapuraAcergy has come to recognize the advantages that the iXBlue GAPS can bring. The GAPS performs well in both deep and shallow-waters and excels in difficult and challenging environmental conditions. The GAPS is no doubt a welcomed investment for the state-of-the-art Sapura 3000.” SapuraAcergy owns a number of ROVINS, MT9 beacons on top of the newly installed GAPS 4th-generation USBL.
DOS, iXBlue’s long-term Sonar customer, needed a full solution for deep water intervention that can position simultaneously ROV, subsea tools, and a shipwreck with an accuracy of 50cm, from 300m to 5000m water depth. The application is for deep water salvage operation. DOS solution was custom-architected using POSIDONIA, RAMSES, OCTANS-3000, PHINS-Subsea and iXBlue transponders. “We did not even ask ourselves the question on whether we should go to the competition, it was obvious. The iXBlue solution was perfect in terms of setup, results and quality. Their products perform highly, even better than the specifications,” said Nicolas Vincent, Head of DOS Survey.
For further information about iXBlue’s inertial-acoustic solutions visit Ocean Business 2015 (booth-H9).
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