(P45) Innovative ADCP Deployment System Development to Inform Device Design and Array Layouts

ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler) measurement campaigns are essential to any tidal device developer as they allow the developer to gain an understanding of the characteristic of the tidal flow at a tidal site of interest. Understanding this flow informs the design of the tidal device and the layout of a tidal device array, and is essential to optimise the performance of the devices and predict the loads the devices will be exposed to in operation. However, ADCP deployments are fraught with risks as the highly energetic tidal sites they are deployed on are unforgiving, which can lead to high financial cost and low stakeholder confidence, leading to an increased cost of device development.
The abstract submitted presents a design methodology which takes into account many of the challenges of deploying ADCPs on tidal sites, gathered from experience, and uses this to develop an ADCP deployment system and methodology. The analysis of this system under the expected load cases is also presented. The result should help the blue economy by informing it of a method for developing a reliable ADCP deployment system, therefore lowering the cost and risk surrounding ADCP deployments and ultimately bringing down the cost of tidal device development.