Customer request

The German submarine U-864 sunk off the coast of Norway during World War II. The submarine was on its way from Germany via Norway to Japan and was carrying about 67 metric tons of mercury. The wreck of U-864 was rediscovered by the Norwegian Navy in 2003, resting on the seabed at a depth of 150 metres. It has broken into two large sections. To prevent any further mercury contamination into the environment the Norwegian coastal administration (NCA) was taking as a first step to monitor the risk of mercury spreading into the environment and to install a counter fill on the seabed to stabilize the broken parts of the submarine.

Our solution

Stringent requirements have been set for environmental monitoring of the work. Develogic was part of the project team which involves Van Oord, the Norwegian Institute for water research and the Norwegian Geotecnical institute. For this projects develogic developed 10 underwater measuring platforms with different sets of sensors and a highly sophisticated underwater communication system. This includes an inductive system which integrates all underwater platforms with sensors and as an additional communication line: an acoustic backup.

This enables to monitor important safety parameters in real time: turbidity and current, as a proxy for the possible spreading of contamination. Also with sets of two different sensors develogic is able to monitor any movement of the instable submarine wreck. All incoming data are accessible via a satellite link by a large spar buoy, which was especially designed by develogic for this project.

The public even could follow the whole process by observing the incoming data stream on a geoview webpage of the Norwegian Institute for Water Research in real time.

With this project develogic set new standards for large scale and highly complex underwater communication systems with integrated measuring platforms and it facilitates the save operation of this project.

Read the full article published in the February 2017 issue of the Sea Technology magazine here.