Making Waves: QinetiQ’s ocean basin gets major upgrade

Sam Hill, Programme Manager, Maritime Investment and Technology

The wave-making capability within QinetiQ’s ocean basin facility – the largest freshwater indoor tank in the world and built in the 1950s – was one of the first of its kind. Having served its purpose incredibly well, it is now reaching the end of its life and needs replacing with a more modern system.  Two years ago a project was set in motion to select suppliers that would be able to meet the highly complex challenges of an upgrade.

The project was split in to two phases: Phase 1 removing the existing equipment, whilst Phase 2 comprises installing the new equipment. Some of the complexity of the programme arises because the existing wavemaker consisted of 10 wedges, each weighing 16 tonnes (pictured), which were originally installed when the basin was empty. Removing them when the basin is full of 40,000 tonnes of water and with the building infrastructure remaining in place, has been an enormous engineering challenge.

Ocean Basin upgrade

I’m pleased to say that Phase 1 has now been successfully completed and the old wavemaker has gone.  The wedges are being replaced with a modern system of 122 flaps, enabling us to create a much more accurate simulation of real sea conditions. The new wavemaker will generate regular waves, long-crested irregular waves, and short-crested irregular waves. The installation has now begun, and is set to finish by the end of March. This will be followed by a training period and a reopening ceremony in mid-June 2014.

The ocean basin facility, equipped with a state-of-the-art motion capture system installed by Qualisys^TM, is used primarily for constrained and free-manoeuvring surface ship and submarine model tests in calm water or waves. Models are fitted with infra-red emitting markers (typically four) and tracked using 19 cameras distributed around the basin.

I look forward to updating you when Phase II is completed at the end of March. In the meantime, please feel free to contact me for more information on our Ocean Basin’s wavemaker.