Wave predictions pay off
A pilot who has to land his aircraft on a rolling aft deck, or an engineer who has to transfer pipes to another ship on the open sea – people like these use their experience to estimate when the water is calm enough to act, but it is always tricky.
Last year, Dr Peter Naaijen was awarded his PhD for a project about predicting wave heights and ship movements. He and his colleague Karel Roozen have now founded the company NextOcean to bring that technology to market. The company won the Innovation Award at the Offshore Energy Exhibition & Conference last year. Knowing when the water is calm enough to work is extremely important to offshore industries. If they can see calmer periods coming more accurately, they can still sail under harsher conditions. The NextOcean system requires hardly any hardware. Instead, it analyses data received from existing radar installations and uses it to infer wave height and wave length. The system can predict between three and five minutes ahead.
Offshore company Allseas wants to use the NextOcean system this summer for the installation of a ready-to-use oil platform off the Norwegian coast. “It’s a big advantage if you can show the customer that you can avoid all the high waves when installing a platform,” explains R&D engineer Ate te Voortwis, who is involved in the project.
