Metocean Buoy for Australian Oil Field Development
AXYS Technologies (Canada) has secured a contract with its Australian partner Metocean Services International (MSI), to provide and deploy a 3-metre ODAS (Ocean Data Acquisition System) buoy and a Subsurface Sentinel mooring in support of a major oil field development in Northern Australia. The systems are designed to satisfy the long-term operational requirement of metocean monitoring in the field and to report data in real time.
The buoy acquires the temperature and system diagnostic data from the Subsurface Sentinel mooring via acoustic modem and relays it, along with directional wave data and a water column profile of current speed and direction, to the nearby platform via UHF radio where the data is ingested into the Data Management System (DMS) software.
AXYS’ 3-metre buoy was selected as the platform of choice for the harsh marine environment given its reputation as a reliable buoy commonly deployed in areas prone to hurricane conditions. The buoy will be accompanied by a Subsurface Sentinel mooring designed to acquire temperature readings through the 250m water column. The Subsurface Sentinel mooring uses AXYS’ WatchMan500 controller to manage an inductive modem solution to gather the temperature readings in the water column and an acoustic modem to transmit the data to the 3-metre buoy.