Live Depth Monitoring for Dredging Operations
Coda Octopus has been involved in dredging operations that have spanned some of the world’s largest trailing suction hopper dredger down to bucket dredgers deployed from a small barge. All operations, regardless of size, have been focused on ensuring site clearance has been performed to specification and in a productive and efficient manner. Traditional methods rely on daily or infrequent surveys of the area to compare to the estimations provided by the typical machine control systems which rely on positioning only.
Our range of real-time 3D volumetric sonars can provide significant efficiency gains by its multi-sensor or multi-purpose capabilities. Firstly, it can act as the dredge operator’s “eyes” in highly turbid conditions to monitor the dredge head and its location relative to the seabed or critical subsea objects, such as a jetty wall, subsea pipeline, cables, or wind farm monopiles. In complex dredging operations such as river banks, boulder fields and around complex infrastructure where collapse and damage can occur without real-time monitoring.
Secondly, using the sophisticated CodaOctopus® Underwater Survey Explorer (USE) software, the design model of the dredge profile required is imported as a real-time reference to allow the operator to see and calculate when dredging has achieved the required level of completion. A simple “traffic light” color palette is used to allow complete hands-free operation of the dredge whilst providing the most accurate real-time operational conditional status. Finally, being the world’s highest definition multi-beam sonar, data from the Echoscope® can be used to survey the area around the dredge site for mapping purposes.
From numerous dredging projects around the world, our client base has realized significant returns on investment by using the Echoscope and our MOTION reference range to increase their dredging efficiencies.
