Nautronix to Supply Rowan’s Third New Ultra-Deepwater Drillship

Nautronix has been awarded another contract to supply NASDrill RS925 deepwater acoustic positioning system, for Rowan’s third new ultra-deepwater drillship.

The vessel will be constructed at Hyundai Heavy Industries shipyard in Ulsan, Korea and will be based on a Hyundai Gusto P1000 design. The vessel will be completed in the fourth quarter of 2014. Nautronix received this order through a well known Norwegian DP Supplier who is supplying their Dynamic Positioning (DP) System on the vessel.

This is the third order that Nautronix have received for the Rowan fleet; for their NASDrill RS925 system, following on from vessels one and two. Nautronix’ NASDrill RS925 system has been designed specifically to meet the requirements for a reliable, stable DP and position reference system for demanding offshore operations, in particular deepwater drilling vessels.

NASDrill RS925 combines the two most accurate deepwater acoustic positioning technologies – Short Baseline (SBL) and Long Baseline (LBL) - to calculate multiple independent position solutions providing reliable, repeatable input to the vessel DP system; with SBL mode providing accuracies of 0.15% slant range and LBL mode providing accuracies up to 1m RMS independent of water depth.

Mark Patterson, Nautronix CEO, commented “We are delighted to be supplying Rowan Companies, Inc. with their third NASDrill RS925 positioning system for their new vessel. This clearly demonstrates Rowan’s confidence in our NASDrill product.”

As with all Nautronix leading commercial acoustic systems, NASDrill RS925 utilises Nautronix proprietary ADS2 (Acoustic Digital Spread Spectrum) broadband signalling technology which has been proven with over ten years of successful subsea operations, to provide superior accuracy, repeatability and reliability for dynamic positioning of vessels during deepwater drilling operations.