Page 21: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (March 2, 2005)

VT Halter Marine to Build

Three for NOAA

VT Halter Marine will build another

Fisheries Survey Vessel, valued at $38 million for NOAA. NOAA exercised its option for the third of four planned vessels under an existing contract. Construction will begin later this year with delivery planned during the second half of 2007.

VT Halter Marine designed the 208-ft.

FSVs in accordance with strict guidelines for acoustic quieting set by the

International Council for Exploration of the Seas. The first ship in the class —

Oscar Dyson — was delivered to NOAA on January 5, 2005 and is one of the most technologically advanced fisheries ships in the world. These NOAA sister ships, with a cutting edge low acoustic signa- ture, will have the ability to perform hydro-acoustic surveys of fish. They will also be able to conduct bottom and mid- water trawls while running physical and biological-oceanographic sampling dur- ing a single deployment.

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Oscar Dyson: Acoustically

Quieted Ship NOAA FRV

The First-in-Class Fisheries Research

Vessel (FRV), Oscar Dyson, delivered to

NOAA on January 5, 2005, was designed and built by VT Halter Marine, Moss

Point. The ship is outfitted with state-of- the art sonar technology, but its most sig- nificant feature is that it has been designed to be "acoustically" quiet underwater. The underwater radiated noise requirements were those specified by the International

Cooperative for the Exploration of the

Seas (ICES). VT Halter Marine subcon- tracted all the acoustical engineering efforts to Noise Control Engineering (NCE) of Billerica, Mass.. NCE is an engineering consulting firm that special- izes in shipboard noise & vibration con- trol and marine acoustics.

NCE performed all noise prediction cal- culations, recommended the treatments necessary to meet the stringent underwa- ter noise requirements and conducted an extensive sound and vibration testing pro- gram. NCE used Designer Noise, a new 3-D acoustic modeling program devel- oped by NCE with Proteus Engineering (Annapolis, Md.) under a Navy SBIR grant, now commercially available. NCE engineers worked closely with engineers from VT Halter Marine and NOAA to optimize all of the noise treatments. In one case, aluminum was recommended over steel for damping cover plates, sav- ing 20 tons. NCE engineers participated in seven sea trial events, conducting com- partment noise, equipment vibration, ship-wide vibration and sonar self-noise surveys.

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