Provision of services for the Port of Douro and Leixões Administration (PDL) - 2020

On 15 October, and with the commitment of UAM ATLANTA, a network of five ondograph buoys near the port of Leixões was completed as part of the provision of services for the APDL. This implementation contemplated the supply, installation and operation of Datawell Directional Waverider buoys, and will last for 6 years.  

The project led by the oceanography division was developed and implemented by the Hydrographic Institute, with the involvement of the Maritime Instrumentation Center, with the commitment of means of the Infrastructure and Transport Division and the collaboration of Supply and Heritage, presenting direct implementation costs, without labor, of 60 010€.

This project aims to obtain and provide data on seawater agitation and temperature, corresponding to the “raw” time series, consisting of vertical displacements and horizontal displacements in the north-south and east-west directions, including their validation. In addition, data should be processed, allowing the estimation of parameters both in the time domain and in frequency. 

At the CIM level, the work began at 8ABR20, with the request for support of the Oceanography Division and implementation deadline at SET/OUT20. In this period the solution was developed (according to figure nr. 6) to ensure a device of 5 buoys without using the acquisition of new buoys, considering the following main requirements:

(a) re-use of existing buoys damaged in paiol, and ultimately provisionally sacrificing the IH network;

(b) Guarantee of work communications frequencies for no interference with the buoy near the Environmental Monitoring Network (MRA) in Leixões;

(c) Resilient receiving station creation;

(d) development of application for data collection, transmission and processing;

(e) Remote network monitoring;

(d) Reassessment of the painting scheme to increase your life cycle;

(e) Redundancy of buoys, knowing that contractually it is not permitted, in any case, to have a period of interruption of data recording more than two weeks, even if a new buoy is required. 

Thus, the solutions adopted were:

(a) Reuse of two existing damaged buoys in paiol, and use of three RMA buoys. It should be noted that all buoys have been upgraded to allow the use of five different transmission frequencies (+ 1 frequency spare) so that there is no interference in the data.

(b) Creation of a receiving station with an antenna, a splitter, five receivers and five computers, an internet modem and a switch, allowing to aggregate all data from buoys. This station also contains three UPS to close any energy anomalies.

(c) Development of the Autoit version 3 language application, which allows you to receive the receiver data and send it to the server.

(d) Implementation and testing of new painting scheme to provide greater protection of buoys, with engineering collaboration and technical visit of representative of the company Hempel;

(e) Fix any malfunctions, with repair times not compatible with data interruption tolerance, using a ready buoy installed in the RMA or a new buoy, with acquisition forecast in 2021.