28 Dossier | ACUA Ocean Pioneer-class H-USV Marked by a plethora of redundancies, including either two onboard hydrogen fuel cells or diesel generators (enabling 18 or 50 days, respectively, of endurance at 4 knots), the design is approved for Cat 0 operations, meaning unlimited freedom to work in open-ocean zones. “We are working towards MCA Workboat Code 3 approvals for everything on the Pioneer-class minus the hydrogen system, because there are no rules or regulations around hydrogen at this time, so we’ll be taking a riskbased certification approach to verify and justify the safety case for hydrogen,” Mike adds. “The near-perfect stability of the SWATH design, combined with the dedicated 5 kW of continuous power for payloads and 6.5 t of carrying capacity, mean we’re in commercial talks with a range of ROV OEMs, most having visited our headquarters in Turnchapel Wharf here in Plymouth in November 2024. “Our first industrial application will probably involve deploying up to 1 t ROVs in asset integrity inspections and light intervention, pipeline inspections, windfarm monitoring, data cable surveying, and the like. “Beyond that – and there are a multitude of prospective dual-use customers – could be highly stable launch and recovery of UAVs for monitoring wind farms or illegal fisheries. Any echosounders, sondes and so on can work from our moon pool, just as in a crewed vessel, but saving crews the need to live for months at sea amid horrendous sea states.” From Southampton to Wight Following an introduction to Ad Hoc in December 2021, Kecsmar became the design authority for the USV’s hull and structures, and it has since led most of the CAD and FEA work, including through all three rounds of the Clean Maritime Demonstration Competition (CMDC), where ACUA secured total project funding of more than £5 million across CMDC Rounds 1, 2 and 3. Southampton, meanwhile, provided critical input on stability calculations, particularly through wave-tank testing, with the three partners’ collaboration progressively iterating its initial prototype into what became Pioneer. By July 2023, such testing included affirming the prototype design’s ability to launch and recover 1 t payloads in various sea states. “We could, for example, simulate all sorts of slamming effects of waves on the hull, which is a lot more difficult to validate and verify via CAD. There isn’t a lot of data available for digitally simulating SWATH vessels to begin with, so it wouldn’t have made much sense for us to do the traditional thing of starting in digital environments and then trying to replicate and verify our results in real-world tests,” Mike says. Pioneer’s full-build phase began in February 2024. The construction of the first complete unit was led by Aluminium Marine Consultants (AMC), a company and shipyard on the Isle of Wight, specialising in aluminium workboats. AMC gave critical input on best practices for shipbuilding, particularly in correcting the guidelines based on ACUA Ocean’s blueprints to achieve better efficiency, structural integrity, and so on. As a result, the Pioneer-class USV solution is designed for manufacturing, forgoing traditional shipbuilding practices in favour of a modular approach in which different parts of the vessel can be cut, brought on-site, matched and welded together to meet customer needs exactly without sacrificing lead times or cost-efficiency. February/March 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology By keeping most of their hull cross-section below surface, SWATH vessels can maintain great stability in severe sea states, particularly when there is no crew onboard to affect trim
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