Page 11: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (July 2020)

Capturing the Systems and Physics of a $3b Structure ing. To prove its mettle, CM Labs frst conducted a pilot proj- ect for Allseas, which consisted of building an engineering simulation for a ship-to-ship pipe handling crane, including a newly developed spreader system. This spreader incorporated a heave compensation mechanism designed to eliminate the need for manual adjustments on the part of the operator.

CM Labs simulated different cables and winches which helped them to more quickly refne their mechanical design, as well as prototyping their control systems and size compo- nents. “Without the capabilities of Vortex Studio,” te Voortwis adds, “you can’t feasibly execute something like this. The feld-testing costs would be astronomical.”

Based on CAD models for the ship, a ship pedestal crane, and the rigging, as well as the basic simulation algorithm All- seas was going to use, CM Labs provided an accurate crane and ship simulation, as well as interfaces, to integrate more sophisticated algorithms for ship motion.

Vortex Studio was an excellent ft for Allseas and a comple- ment to existing engineering tools such as MATLAB. “We conducted a serious investigation of other potential partners as well,” says te Voortwis, “and mainly chose CM Labs’ solu- tions because of fexibility — we knew beforehand that we would need a lot of advanced simulations. “In the offshore business it’s common to buy a simulator that is not modifable or extensible by the end-client. That was not what we were after, so Vortex Studio was just the best choice since it allowed for us to build extensible simulations that could be improved and modifed with the life of the ves- sel.” Allseas’ plans for Vortex are essentially as large-scale as the Pioneering Spirit itself. “There’s a lot of time and man- power invested in the simulator right now,” says to Voortwis.

When asked to quantify the savings associated with using

Vortex to simulate the Pioneering Spirit, te Voortwis is can- did: “Previously this work would have taken six man-months, at 100 euros an hour. I think you can do the math there. And we would have ended up with a custom-built simulator, not with an extensible simulation platform as fexible as what we have with Vortex Studio.”

The Author

Clark

David Clark is CM Labs Senior

Product Marketing Manager. A graduate of Concordia University (Montreal), he has two decades of experience in the high-tech sector.