Technology Development
With the availibility of PCs and digital lab instrumentation in the late 1980's, also high-frequency data such as echosounder signals could be acquired and stored. the ParaDigMA project established a system software and hardware, which was installed on all German vessels with Parasound Sediment Echosounder.
For multichannel seismic data acquisition, commercial systems were mostly dedicated to hydrocarbon exploration and were just not suitable for our purposes. We have therefore developed our own system to acquire analog streamer data, which could be adjusted to our needs through a better visualization, higher sample rates and fast disk storage. Hanno Keil developed the 'Marine MultiChannel Acquisition System MaMuCS since 2006.
Ultrasonic Transmission Velocity Measurements
Determining elastic properties of soft sediments can be achieved by using ultrasonic sound transmission, e.g. across a sediment core. A sophisticated equipment was purchased in conjunction with an acquisition and processing software to determine high precision velocity and attenuation profiles.
Technology Development
To move towards high-resolution seismic, adjustments of existing technology were essential, and through the purchase of different streamer systems, we requested designs which were particularly enhancing high-frequency signals. This pioneered shallow water multichannel seismic, which is a key for offshore surveys, e.g. for wind farms.
For offshore windfarms, glacially transported rocks pose a potential risk for piling into the ground., particularly in the Baltic Sea, but also in other parts of the world. We have developed a patented seismic method to locate such boulders by covering a wider swath of the subsurface down to several tens of meters.
Monitoring of cable position and burial depth is an ongoing task related to offshore cables, but so far only magnetic methods are availabe, which require a shutdown of cable operation. We are developing methods and instruments to do this task acoustically which would save time and costs related to renewable energy supply from offshore.