Offshore staff
HOUSTON – UTEC Survey has advanced its service offering by doubling its AUV fleet to four vehicles. The fleet offers clients enhanced subsea positioning, robust operational performance, and low logistics designed for dual-mode operations.
The AUVs comprise separate modules enabling operators to change configuration by adding or removing sensor modules, subject to the requirements of each mission. Typical missions have included pre-route survey, structure and pipeline inspection, scour monitoring and shallow environmental investigation.
The ability to rapidly reconfigure the AUVs means, for example, that a mission undertaking seafloor bathymetry can be reconfigured on deck to undertake the next mission with a suite of environmental sensors for locating hydrocarbon seeps or pipeline leak detection. The AUVs’ endurance with a full sensor suite is approximately six hours, while its low logistics and small backdeck footprint allows for multiple AUVs being deployed at one time, providing data acquisition on a 24-hour basis.
Developments and enhancements to standard off-the-shelf systems include a sub-bottom profiler module, enhanced surface DGPS acquisition, subsea acoustic positioning, a magnetometer ferrous metal detection module, a seep/leak detection module, and photogrammetry capability for subsea structure/pipeline inspection.
UTEC provides a range of survey services including offshore positioning and construction support, metocean, geophysical and AUV surveys, geotechnical sampling and consulting services to the oil, gas, and energy industries. The company also offers dimensional control surveys, laser scanning, 3D modeling, and the iSITE asset management software.
05/03/2014
