Research Vessel with General Platform, Smart System and Special Equipment Required

Lu Fangqi

The oceans cover 71% of the world, while human understanding of the oceans is less than 5%. With economic development, countries around the world have come to realize the importance of offshore resource development,developing the maritime economy and protecting the marine ecological environment. Correspondingly, as an important carrier tool for human survey and research of oceans, research vessels have got new development in recent years.

In a broad sense, research vessels include those built and operated by governmental or research institutions for hydrological survey, marine scientific research, polar research and fishery survey and geophysical seismic survey ships built and operated by oil and gas companies for oil and gas exploration.According to ocean research vessel classification rules of FOFC, research vessels can be generally divided into global, ocean, regional and coastal grades by ship size, endurance and survey capability.

From the research fleet scale,the research fleet scale of world main economies such as the US, EU, Japan and Russia is by far larger than that of China. According to statistics, the current US research fleet scale tops 250 ships, the EU totals 302 ships, and more than 100 ships for Russia and Japan respectively. China started to establish the national oceanographic survey fleet in 2012, and through continuous growth and development, the fleet number has increased from initial 19 ships to 50 ships.

Obviously, from China’s current research fleet scale, ship number and function are far from enough if requirements of global oceanographic survey normalization and business orientation and extensive performance of international cooperation in oceanographic survey are to be met. Therefore, China has ushered in a new construction maria of research vessels in recent years. As of August of 2017, China’s oceanographic survey vessels under design or construction had totaled 10, ranking world first both in new construction and under construction quantity.

Different research requirements correspond to respective unique research means, and this requires the ship platform should have navigational status adapted to various survey capabilities. Research vessels generally have the following specific technical requirements depending on survey capability requirements:

Dynamic Positioning Capability

Research vessels generally have survey operation capability of marine organism and marine geology, remote operated vehicle (ROV) or various sampling equipment and measuring equipment should be released, and these operations have certain requirements for ship positioning capability and positioning accuracy, ships are required to maintain certain position or certain course in line with different operational capabilities,they should not deviate underwater instrument release position too far, hence oceanographic survey vessels are normally required to have dynamic positioning capability.

Flexible Operation Performance

As research vessels carry many research instruments and equipment,vessels are required to smoothly recover them after survey sampling of operating vessels is over, therefore ships should have flexible operation performance.

Speed Navigation Performance

Resear chvessels with oceanographic geophysical survey system,deepsea environment detecting system and other survey capabilities are required to have good low-speed navigation performance. For example, seismic survey gas burst survey, deepsea towing operation, etc.

Redundancy of Power Station

The research vessel should provide sufficient power load if survey equipment provided on board is to operate normally,therefore the research vessel requires that the power station should have certain redundancy.

Low Noise and Low Vibration Performance

The research vessel carries a lot of detecting equipment, with high requirements for the ship noise. In order not to impair surveying accuracy of the ship detecting equipment, the research vessel should reduce the ship’s own noise considering ship form design,structural design and selection of low vibration and low noise equipment.

With the launch of the “Belt and Road” initiative, the research project will become of China’s bright spots during the 13th Five-Year Plan period. In the next five years, China will vigorously develop equipment and systems of deepsea surveying, ocean drilling, submarine resource exploitation and utilization, marine operation support, etc.; promote development and engineering of deepsea space station,large floating operation structure; break through key technology of construction of “Longgong 1” Deepsea Test Platform, cooperate in building shorebased observation station in the Arctic Pole, build new research station in the Antarctic Pole and ice-breaker;gradually form a global oceanographic stereoscopic observation system.Meanwhile, the national oceanographic survey fleet is organizing the development of the industry standard“Oceanographic survey vessel classification” to unify oceanographic survey vessel terminology and definition and classification methods.Requirements of oceanographic survey vessels are projected to take serial development trend rather than pointshaped development. Fleet number should match the task of Chinese maritime rights and interests extending from coastal waters to open sea, so that resource allocation is more rational and the unbalanced problem of task loads between ships is eliminated.

As human understanding of the oceans deepens, we have ushered in“Great Research Era” —— higherend and more advanced equipment,expansion of ocean research to deepsea and polar region, and platform integration and data integration are boosting output of oceanographic research. This means new-generation research vessels will develop to general-purpose platform, smart system and professional equipment,improving and promoting ocean survey fleet structure configuration. For that purpose, overseas shipyards and design companies have set out for developing serial research vessel design, e.g.,Damen Shipyard developed multifunction auxiliary ship concept aimed at providing a unified platform for ocean survey, diving support, torpedo retrieving, ROV and UAV launching and retrieving,maritime research and rescue and other coast guard functions. In this respect, China should enhance research,and on the basis of basic property and technology research of hull, build a system of research vessel platform,equipment and system.★