KRAKEN

Ocean energy technologies are moving steadily from laboratory scale models to real scale prototypes and arrays of converters. In order to be reliable and cost-effective, all these devices require regular Underwater Inspection Repair and Maintenance (IRM) services. Nowadays the solutions of underwater inspection and maintenance are industrial class ROVs and divers. Since the current ROV solutions still do not provide a sufficiently low cost and high precision for many of the IRM operations, specialised divers are still being used by the industry, despite the high-risk and high rate of mortality.

Due to the lack of tools specially designed for the Ocean Energy technologies, the industry is obliged to use standard solutions that are commonly used in the oil and gas industry, which have a higher cost.

The Kraken project aims to tackle the existing gap of the ROV tools specially designed for the Ocean Energy sector needs with the objective to reduce the high OPEX costs associated to the underwater IRM.

Kraken brings mature proven telemanipulation technologies from surgical rooms into the deep sea. Kraken’s objective is to improve the performance level of the offshore IRM operations by completely avoiding the human hazard of using divers and to reduce significantly the costs of work class ROVs by using smaller inspection ROVs deployed from much smaller vessels at a fraction of the cost.

General Information

Funding: OCEANERA-NET/FCT
Coordinator at WavEC: Miguel Cerezo
Total Funding (Requested EU contribution): € 359 020
WavEC Funding: € 80 160
Duration: February 2017 – July 2019 (30 months)
Coordinator: WavEC Offshore Renewables
Partners: Instituto Superior Técnico, ULPGC - Universidade de Las Palmas e Gran-Canárias and CADFEM Ireland.