Sustainable Marine Energy has installed four subsea drilled rock anchors in Orkney’s Fall of Warness ahead the deployment of its Plato tidal platform at the European Marine Energy Centre.
The 3.5m long anchors have a nominal holding capacity of 100 tonnes and will be used to moor its the Plato device at EMEC.
The “world first” innovation was developed in partnership with drilling outfit Rockbit and Leask Marine.
The anchoring remotely operated vehicle used for the installation has been developed in-house at SME over the past three years. Marine operations were performed from Leask Marine’s multicat C-Salvor.
SME director Jason Hayman said: “I’d also personally like to thank all of our team who have worked long hours, and sometimes in quite adverse conditions throughout the development and testing programme of both the anchors and AROV.”
The AROV first saw action in the Solent in 2014 installing helical screw piles into the clay seabed to moor Plato for its initial Yarmouth trials.
Since then the company has tackled two streams of technology development; development of an expanding rock anchor that requires no grout for installation, and integrating the required technology in the AROV package to enable remote installation at 30m depth in an extreme tidal environment.
Building off this success SME is now working to develop a range of anchors with greater holding capacity and suitable for a range of substrates.
Image: Rock anchor drilling (SME)
