What is the benefit of supplementing ADCP data with data from external sensors?
ADCP data has a wide variety of applications, from Aquaculture, dredging and scour monitoring, to critical infrastructure maintenance, offshore renewable energy (ORE), and many more. Whilst ADCPs can tell you ‘which direction’, ‘how fast’, and ‘where’, they are less capable of saying ‘what’. Constraining the properties of suspended particles or ambient conditions normally requires deploying additional sensors in the same location as the ADCP. However, this raises the challenge of fusing the sensor and ADCP data in post‑processing once the device is recovered and the data downloaded.
What is the Origin solution?
To integrate external sensors, Origin ADCPs have a wet connector which allows power and communications to an external sensor. So if the sensor does not have its own battery, Origin can power it. This allows data from the sensor to be streamed into the ADCP when it is capturing data.
Most sensors with an RS232 interface are supported, and like the ADCP data, the sensor measurements are logged to the ADCP internal memory so that all measurements are in one place. Sensors typically used include:
- Sound velocity (SV) sensors which provide a local measurement of sound speed
- Optical backscatter (OBS) sensors which provide local measurements of turbidity and/or chemical compounds (parameters)
- Conductivity/Temperature/Depth (CTD) sensors
- Pressure sensors
- Fluorometers
- Acoustic noise recorders
- Hydrocarbon/CO2 sensors
From the diverse and non-exclusive list above, it is generally difficult to predict which sensor will be selected to operate alongside the ADCP. It is therefore challenging to fuse the ADCP data with the sensor data using standard firmware.
To mitigate this problem, Origin can pass external sensor packets to an installed Edge application. A decoder for the specific installed sensor can be integrated into the Edge app, thereby placing control of the data fusion in the hands of the user.
Data flow from an external sensor into Origin 600, with the data logged for redundancy, and automatically passed to an installed EDGE application for fusing with the ADCP data.
The code for interpreting the external sensor data is minimal as demonstrated below.
Interpreting external sensor data in an Edge application. A piece of Python code that is called whenever a new external sensor measurement is available. The code in this example simply echoes the measurement back to the user, but fusion with ADCP data would be straightforward to implement instead.
The sensor and ADCP data can be fused in whatever format desired by the user. Once this has occurred, the fused data can be exported topside via the acoustic modem for near real‑time analysis.
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