Arctic DP: Safe and Green Dynamic Positioning Operations of Offshore Vessels in an Arctic Environment
The project description from the Norwegian Research Council:
It is an expressed need of the industry to strengthen the competences of the Norwegian maritime industry in arctic marine operations with special focus on dynamic positioning (DP). The objective of this KMB is to enable future systems for DP in arctic environments to be automatic control systems. The control system must construct an accurate picture of the vessel’s and the environment’s situation, combining measurements with models in observers, and it must act on this information safely using automatic feedback control. However, in designing such control systems, it is vital to have a good understanding of the vessel and its hydrodynamics and the disturbances that influence the dynamic behavior of the vessel (ice; in addition to waves, wind, current). In overall there are two main research objectives of the research; (1) to understand and build competence on the effects of ice loads on DP vessels through modeling and simulation, and (2) to carry out mathematical control designs that targets import ant aspects for safe commercial systems. This means that focus is put on the DP vessel itself: ice-hull interaction forces and how to control the vessel for DP in ice, and on the ice management system: how to collect, analyze, and present ice data for the operation area and how to perform physical ice management most efficient.
In order to target these research challenges, the following work packages and ph.d. themes have been defined:
- WP1: Project administration
- WP2: DP control system redesign
– (PhD #1) Guidance and control of a DP vessel to handle feasible ice loads.
- WP3: Autonomous ice observation system
– (PhD #2) Autonomous aerial ice observation system.
– (PhD #3) Autonomous underwater ice observation system.
– (PhD #5) Image and sensory data processing for ice observation.
- WP4: IM ice load reduction
– (PhD #4) Technology and methods to enable safe and low-risk arctic DP operations.
- WP5: Demonstration and dissemination of project results.
In order to achieve the goals, a multidisciplinary team is established by 4 key researchers (professors) from 3 departments at NTNU together with the industrial partners Kongsberg Maritime, DNV, and Statoil. When these leading industrial partners combine forces with NTNU on the topics of this KMB, they clearly make a statement for the potential of this research. In addition, research synergy will be established with several research projects, such as CeSOS, CivArctic and SACME.
