ATTACH – Acoustic Tagging Technologies Applied to Cables and subsea Hardware

The ATTACH (Acoustic Tagging Technologies Applied to Cables and subsea Hardware) project is a three-way

collaboration between Subsea Asset Location Technologies (SALT) Ltd., Precision Acoustics Ltd. and the

University of Birmingham to carry out a feasibility study to identify remote-sensing, acoustical methods of

labelling high-value subsea energy assets, such as cables and pipelines.

It is not generally appreciated that finding an asset might take a significant amount of time and money as the

cable, or pipeline, might have been buried or moved as a result of ocean currents, the asset may then become

invisible to a sonar system. Thus any method of tracking the asset without having to excavate it would

dramatically reduce costs. The aim of this project is to design synthetic sonar targets that float above the asset

and are significantly easier to detect using a sonar system then the asset itself. One can imagine that being

able to see a string of such targets over a range of a few hundreds of metres (likened to cat’s-eyes whilst

driving at night) would dramatically increase the detectability of such assets.