Fugro Announces Purchase of FOCUS-2 ROTV Systems

Fugro Survey Limited will be operating two brand new purpose built Focus-2 ROTV systems for the 2006 acoustic pipeline inspection season. This new generation of ROTV will be equipped and operated by Fugro to offer the highest definition and most efficient acoustic pipeline inspection service in the North Sea.

In addition to providing increased stability (decimetre accuracy in height above seabed plus superior roll/pitch/yaw control), these latest generation ROTVs use state of the art fibre optic telemetry for vehicle and sensor communication. This results in improved data quality and therefore a more precise image of the pipeline. The systems’ increased capacity allows the Focus-2 to carry a broad range of sensor packages of underwater equipment including digital side scan sonar, multibeam bathymetry, mechanical forward looking sonar, mechanical scanning profiling sonar, sub bottom profiler, fibre optic gyro and compass.

Modifications to the design of the Focus housing means the Focus-2 system as a whole benefits from being stronger, lighter and more suited to infield operations. Lower maintenance overheads and therefore better up-times are expected. Fugro’s Focus-2s will be fitted with Edgetech 4200-FS side scan sonar systems operating at 300 and 600kHz to provide highly resolute data with much improved signal-to-noise ratios.

Fully redundant hardware will maximise up-time. Typical production rates will be between 140 and 180 line km per day, for infield and trunk lines respectively.

We will operate from our DP vessel Fugro Mercator. Specifically designed as a multi purpose survey vessel, it is permanently mobilised and can be rapidly deployed to survey locations worldwide. The vessel is fitted with a Simrad EM1002 100KHz Swathe Bathymetry system, a Simrad SDP11 DP system and Simrad HiPAP USBL.

Fugro Mercator can be fitted with an observation class Seaeye Lynx ROV (OBSROV), alongside the two Focus-2 ROTV systems. This would allow for immediate visual inspection of targets identified during the acoustic inspection. Onboard interpretation of pipeline inspection data will be undertaken, to produce a whole dataset that is robust, integrated and interpreted in the context of the environment within which the data were obtained, thus avoiding conflict through undertaking interpretation at different times.