Kongsberg Maritime’s Subsea Monitoring (SuMo) and Kongsberg Mesotech have developed an innovative sonar based system that continuously monitors the depth of port berths.
“Called BDMRS – Berth Depth Monitoring and Reporting System, it puts real-time data about dynamically changing berth conditions into the hands of the people who need it, when they need it ,” Kongsberg said.
Ports are subject to natural and man-caused conditions that affect the depth of berths and the channel. These causes can be categorized as natural causes and operational causes.
Natural causes are water-borne solids carried downstream and material driven inland by storm activity.
Operational causes result from material being dropped off vessels and docks into the berths and from operation of thrusters and propellers during vessel manoeuvring.
As a result, the harbor bottom is continually changing and it changes randomly. It is essential to know the depth in order for safe port entry and docking and indeed to avoid under loading vessels in berths that are actually deeper than believed.
The BDMRS uses DAS sonars to acquire profile data of the berth bottom adjacent to the instrumented section.
The frequency of data collection can be defined by the user’s needs – continually, hourly, daily, weekly or on-demand.
The data is then uplinked to the monitoring station using a suitable telemetry link. The result of each scan is a point cloud representation of the channel-bed at the scan time.