The 10th ONR/MTS Buoy Workshop 2014

Photo Courtesy of Univ. of Sao Paulo, Brazil, ATLAS-B

You are cordially invited to join us at the 10th ONR/MTS Buoy Workshop, sponsored jointly by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Marine Technology Society (MTS).

The 10th Buoy Workshop will be held from Monday March 3rd thru Thursday March 6th 2014 at the Town and Country Resort & Conference Center in San Diego, California. We open with an Ice-Breaker on Monday night, March 3rd; the Workshop’s Speaker Program begins on Tuesday, March 4th at 8 am, and ends after lunch on Thursday, March 6th. One afternoon will be used for site tours of facilities in the San Diego area that are engaged in active buoy work.

Mission, History, and Purpose
The Buoy Workshop’s mission is to foster the technology and experience exchange in the highly specialized field of oceanographic and other data buoy systems.

Two or three Buoy Workshops were organized in the seventies and eighties by Henri Berteaux and Robert Walden at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. At that time, there was a lack of national and international exchange and knowledge of buoy technology focusing on activities and developments at the different U.S. and worldwide research facilities and government agencies. In 1995 to help bridge this exchange gap, Dr. Thomas Swean from the U.S. Office of Naval Research initiated and partially funded an effort to start more regular Buoy Technology Workshops. As a result, this initiative, the first ONR/MTS Buoy Workshop, convened in 1996 in San Diego, CA; with Buoy Workshops being held every two years since then. Since 2000, the meetings were held in cities where active buoy projects were done at local facilities that allowed site visits. In 2004, Rick Cole, at that time with the University of South Florida, started as Workshop Co-Chair after Judy Rizoli from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution became the Workshop Administrator.

The bi-annual ONR/MTS Buoy Workshops take advantage of the informal workshop environment to ease open and focused presentations, along with discussions and exchanges, for the benefit of all attendees. You are invited to report on your work and share successes and failures with established and new buoy system and buoy component developments. The workshops have become focused gatherings for researchers, engineers, buoy system technologists, and students worldwide where they can exchange updates of their work and progress in understanding, practicing and improving buoy systems knowledge, technology, and survivability. For each of the past 7 Workshops, CDs documenting the Speaker Programs, Abstracts, and Power-Point Presentations have been compiled. Summaries of past Buoy Workshops can also be seen at: www.whoi.edu/buoyworkshop/past/index.html

Note: Visitors who are citizens of certain countries are required to have an entry visa in order to visit the United States (U.S.). The list is available at: http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/without/without_1990.html

Buoy Systems – Where are we going?
Oceanographic and ocean engineering data buoy systems’ understanding and technology has greatly advanced in the last 50 years. Significant technological aspects and obstacles of buoy systems and their components will be discussed. Topics for the 2014 workshop include but are not limited to:

• Buoy Systems for the “Ocean Observatories Initiative” (OOI) Covering Coastal, Regional, and Global Observatories
• Marine Hydrokinetics, Buoy Systems for Harvesting the Energy of Offshore Waves and Currents
• Floating Offshore Wind Power Harvesting Platforms (AWEA Initiative), their Moorings and Cable Challenges
• Telemetry and Power Linkage between Surface Buoys, In-Line Sensors, and Ocean Bottom Sensors: Can Cat-5 Type or Cat-6 Cable Assemblies and Fiber-Optic Signal Carriers survive in Buoy Moorings?
• Durable Compliant Wave Motion Absorbing Elements for Observatory Moorings
• Buoy Design, Development of “green “Buoys with Wind and Wave Motion Power Generators to reduce dependency on batteries as power source.
• Applicable Solutions and Experiences from Offshore Oil Exploration Platform and Buoy Systems
• Arctic and Antarctic Under the Ice Buoy Systems and Components
• Light-Weight EM and EOM Buoy Mooring Cables and their Terminations
• At-Sea Deployment, Servicing, and Retrieval, Service Life Predictions and tests of Key Components

Format
The Speaker Program is organized in focused topical sessions consisting of 20 minute power point presentations. Typically, there are 25 to 35 presentations given by volunteer speakers that are followed by a question and answer panel discussion. In addition to the Speaker Program, one afternoon is set aside for site visits to San Diego area facilities engaged in active buoy work. As in the past, a CD with the Buoy Workshop 2014 Record will be compiled and mailed after the workshop.

New: Immediately following the Buoy Workshop on Thursday, March 6, a 1-1/2 day MTS Undersea Cable & Connector Workshop - after a 16 year hiatus - is being organized at the same site. The 1996 and 1998 Buoy Workshops were successfully started as a Sequential Workshop following the 23rd and 24th annual MTS Undersea Cable & Connector Workshop with much help from the Cable’s long-term organizer, Al Berian. We would like to return the favor and help to get the Cable Workshops started again after this long hiatus. For more information, contact Jennifer Snyder, PE, from SAIC, at jennifer.k.snyder@saic.com. This is a rare opportunity to learn from two related highly specialized areas of engineering technology.