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ProteusDS - Fish Farm Mooring Design Toolset
The ProteusDS Fish Farm toolset is a specialized software designed for the meticulous task of mooring design in aquaculture environments. It simplifies the intricacies of configuring and evaluating fish farm mooring systems, including floating collar and steel cage designs. The software offers robust capabilities for developing precise farm mooring grids and adjusting system orientations to accommodate unique site conditions such as bathymetry and local currents. Among its features are the System Designer, facilitating quick setup of farm systems, and the Case Explorer, which automates mooring load checks against environmental factors like wind, waves, and currents. This toolset is engineered to align with international standards like NS9415 and ISO 16488, enabling users to meet stringent compliance requirements efficiently. Additionally, the Official Parts Library permits users to populate mooring systems with commercially available components and generate comprehensive Bills of Materials. The ProteusDS Fish Farm toolset is an essential resource for ensuring the resilience and efficacy of aquaculture operations.
How can you customize a design and check compliance with standards like NS9415?
Whether developing a quote for a new fish farm mooring system, or reviewing an existing installation, as a mooring analyst, there’s seemingly always little adjustments or changes to check. And fish farm mooring systems can get large and complex. What seem like minor changes to one, may have unexpected effects without a comprehensive review. Suddenly, these apparently minor adjustments turn into a significant change management project. There’s so much to consider during mooring design and analysis: uncertain bathymetry, lease constraints, wind, waves, current, tidal elevation, installation vessels and operations, anchoring consideration, climate change – the list goes on.
Standards don’t tell you exactly what to do
Standards such as NS9415 provide many factors and guidelines to consider. Checking a mooring system design against standards means you’re greatly reducing the risks across the board: reducing the chance of equipment failure, preventing escapes, protecting the marine environment, and meeting local regulatory requirements, too.
But finding a practical and cost-effective engineered solution can be overwhelming when faced with a myriad of requirements – and a shrinking timeline, too. The trick is something to help handle the sheer number of details involved in checking these factors.
What’s needed is purpose-built fish farm mooring design software
The software needs to be able to quickly set up the most commonly used farm architectures – steel cage or floating collar designs. It needs to make the process of setting up the mooring line lengths and positioning straightforward. A material library with commercially available components on hand is required to confirm mooring performance and strength requirements – and make the bill of materials when it comes time for purchasing. Reporting to confirm loads and strength levels in the right combination of currents and waves in accordance with standards requirements, is key, too.
Rapidly configure common commercial farm mooring grid systems. Fish farm systems have thousands of mooring and rigging components that need to align properly in 3D space. It’s time consuming to get all the connectivity right – and you don’t want to miss a detail that could be critical to holding the farm together. The System Designer makes it quick and easy to generate typical floating collar or steel cage farm system grids based on common parameters like general farm dimensions and number of cages.
Easily reorient farm based on local site conditions. Every site has its own special challenges to accommodate a farm. The shape of the lease area, a nearby shoreline, complex bathymetry, or local current may all influence how a farm is oriented and often many little adjustments are necessary to find what works. The System Designer makes it easy to re-orient the farm system and mooring lines to see what the best fit could be.
Set initial mooring sag for quick pretension estimate. The farm system pretension is crucial to get right. With so many mooring lines, the process to make sure pretension is balanced can be tedious, with many small adjustments in line length to make. The System Designer specifies mooring sag to get a solid starting point for system grid pretension ahead of environmental load checks.
Automate mooring load checks in environmental batch cases. The farm mooring system needs to survive different combinations of environmental conditions from wind, currents, and waves. Mapping out what environmental load cases are needed can take time. Managing the resulting data can leave you feeling overwhelmed, too. The Case Explorer makes it straightforward to construct, simulate, and report on any combination of environmental load cases to check mooring loads strength requirements.
Evaluate mooring strength to international standards. Standards like NS 9415, ISO 16488, or the Scottish Standard have different requirements for combinations of environmental load cases to check mooring strength. Mapping these specific requirements to mooring design software can take a lot of specialized focus and time. The Case Explorer makes it easy to follow international standard mooring strength requirements by generating the required load cases necessary.
Rapidly generate farm grid and mooring system with the Official Parts Library. Equipment suppliers the world over have an immense number of moorings, shackles, nets, compensator buoys, and more available. It takes a lot of time to generate model components from the technical specification sheets available. Save time by using the Official Parts Library to populate the farm grid and mooring system with commonly used components.
Automatically create a Bill of Materials to source parts. When the mooring design is done, you need a shopping list – a Bill of Materials – to source parts. But going over every component in the mooring and tallying up all the numbers and line lengths is a time-consuming and mind-numbing task. With one click in ProteusDS System Designer, you have a spreadsheet Bill of Materials for your mooring design based on parts you’ve included in the project ready to go.