Windea Leibniz Puts RangeGuard Monopole Through Its Paces

Guidance Marine’s RangeGuard Monopole system has completed its sea trials on-board the Service Operation Vessel (SOV) Windea Leibniz on the Sandbank offshore wind farm in Germany.

As a result, a complete RangeGuard Monopole system was installed on Windea Leibniz. A fully DP integrated system is already on-board Windea Leibniz’s sister vessel, Windea La Cour.

The RangeGuard Monopole system is designed to provide an environmentally referenced position for dynamic positioning at sites where there will be a single, simple monopole in the sensors’ field of view. Typically, this would be on an offshore wind farm, where an SOV would approach a monopile wind turbine to deploy a motion stabilised gangway for crew transfer purposes.

A vessel approaches an offshore wind turbine on DP and, typically, uses differential GPS and a laser PRS to obtain precise position. If poor quality reflector targets are installed on the wind turbine it can lead to the laser sensor detecting false reflections due to their proximity to other highly reflective surfaces, such as the high vis jackets of workmen on the landing platform and walk-to-work gangway. To overcome this problem, high quality reflective prism targets should replace low quality reflectors, but the cost of installing these on every single wind turbine in a wind farm can be prohibitive. RangeGuard Monopole removes the need for installed targets altogether, Guidance Marine said.

“Removing the need for physical targets altogether is a step change in wind farm navigation. A step change being driven by the RangeGuard Monopole system,” Andrew Stead, Head of Sales & Business Development at Guidance Marine, said.