The Navy monitors safety at sea worldwide. That’s a tough job in challenging circumstances. Many countries have navy vessels with sonar systems that are equipped with DeRegt cables. These are developed in cooperation with Ultra, a leader in underwater warfare technologies.
Engineers within subsea projects are often unsure of the pros and cons of steel armoured cable or aramid fibre armoured cable. How can you know the most beneficial armouring for your subsea project as an engineer?
Scarce metals and minerals that we will desperately need in the future lie at the bottom of the ocean for us to pick. Therefore, many countries are looking into the possibilities of deep sea mining: harvesting these raw materials at depths of kilometers. An important role is reserved for ROVs and ROV Cables.
The EU aims to reduce dependency on imports of raw materials. ROVs and ROV Cables play an important role in harvesting such materials in European waters.
For a cutting-edge EU Research Project, DeRegt was asked to join an EU-funded consortium of 14 companies. Industry, research institutes and service companies across seven different countries joined forces.
Subsea cables are stored on land and (mainly) used in water. That means the temperature difference between deploying and retrieving can be high. Therefore, controlling the cable's temperature in-field is often a challenge.
Why is it important to involve your cable supplier early in developing your new product or equipment? At DeRegt, we often see customers who have succeeded in developing an excellent Sonar or ROV system but forget to think of the cables involved or underestimate their complexity.
Verifying the required specifications is perhaps the most crucial part of designing a naval subsea cable. After all, as an engineer, you must be able to prove that the cable works as it is supposed to. There are five different ways of verification, one of which is subsea cable testing.
At DeRegt, we use a Design Compliance Matrix (DCM) as the foundation for the verification process. This way, you know that all of your specifications are thoroughly verified. This blog explains how a DCM works and what verification methods there are, including examples.
In a previous blog, we listed all types of sonar system requirements. A couple of verification methods can be used to verify your cable specifications. Extensive testing can’t always be avoided, but luckily, some offshore cable specifications can also be verified by analysis. After all, a lot of data is available on materials and surroundings.
Environmental sonar system requirements are essential requirements in the naval world. Fortunately, these requirements are examples of analyzable specifications. They usually do not require expensive testing, since materials and the environmental conditions they can handle are documented. In this blog, we will list the most common environmental requirements and how we make sure they are verified by analysis. There’s also one exception to this rule.
As a defense engineer, you can’t know everything about every aspect of your sonar system or other underwater defense systems. However, the client probably holds you responsible for the final result, and thus for every component. Therefore, it is crucial that you have knowledgeable partners about specific components within your subsea project.
Early Supplier Involvement is key as it allows your suppliers to become partners. For example, if your subsea cable manufacturer is known in an early stage of the project, the cable experts can adjust the cable perfectly to the rest of the system. Early Supplier Involvement has more advantages, as stated in this blog.
Every underwater defense cable has its own requirements that are absolutely crucial. As an engineer, you want to aim for the most effective and efficient way of verifying these to your client. You want to be sure everything is thoroughly verified, without paying too much for extensive subsea cable testing.
In this blog, we explain how we determine which requirements have to be tested and how some factors can be analyzed with data. We then explain some important qualification tests for underwater defense cables, that are crucial for a successful underwater defense project.
