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GCE Ocean Technology

Large modifiable underwater mothership MUM – Operational and technical concepts for complex unmanned tasks

Aim of the “MUM– Large Modifiable Underwater Mothership” Project is to explore near-future technology unlocking the potential of large UUVs within the next decade. We present a highly modular and variable unmanned underwater vehicle family, providing novel operational and technical concepts for efficient and economic subsea tasks and works under harsh conditions. The new vehicle class brings unconventional ideas to the table towards solving the needs of the offshore oil and gas industry regarding cost efficiency and reduced manning:

The design of modular building block systems allows a focused mission-dependent module assembly. A scalable fuel cell based energy system, based on proven submarine technology will power the MUM throughout even long-term deployments. New developments in autonomy, navigation, and communication enable autonomous missions which usually require permanent operator control. With payloads or toolboxes up to ten tons, the MUM system will largely extend the possible tasks for UUVs. This concept design is going to be validated through model tests of vehicle variants in summer 2019 and real scale tests of critical components. Underlying operational concepts, mission module designs as well as vehicle configurations for the tasks were validated by industry experts e.g. from Equinor and PGS. Exemplarily, we present two relevant missions; i.e. the exchange of subsea control modules (SCM) by the vehicle and the deployment and retrieval of ocean bottom seismic nodes.

Willem Hendrik Wehner

Mr. Wehner is in the early stages of his career. He started his position in the product development department of thyssenkrupp Marine Systems in 2015. He focusses on the early stages of developing submarines and large unmanned underwater vehicles, in particular with regards to product modularity. Mr. Wehner holds an MSc in Ship and Offshore Technology from University of Strathclyde and Hamburg University of Technology and a BSc in Naval Architecture from Hamburg University of Technology. He is motivated by working within a passionate team of engineers and his ongoing discovery of new facets of technology in the underwater domain.
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