Fugro’s newly digitised marine cone penetration test (CPT) workflow provides secure access to validated marine site characterisation information within 60 minutes of acquiring the Geo-data, compared to the norm of up to 24 hours. The new synchronised, on-premise and cloud-based CPT dataflow process enables faster, more informed decision-making, enhances collaborative working and reduces project risk.
The project milestones for offshore wind farm developments are becoming tighter and more challenging. The annual number of new offshore turbine installations is predicted to rise to around 15,000 by 2030.
Site-specific soil data is on the critical path for offshore foundation design and turbine manufacture. Delayed access to CPT Geo-data or the downstream use of superseded versions can result in unoptimised foundation design and create significant financial and scheduling risks. Given the rapid uptake in the offshore wind market, we optimised our CPT Geo-data workflow.
We now automatically link the flow of CPT Geo-data from acquisition, through processing and validation, to our cloud-based delivery platform Gaia.Hub. This integrated approach means that CPT Geo-data is available in Gaia.Hub within one hour of acquisition. Clients are notified automatically, so can quickly view and access the data and start using it in their ground modelling and foundation design processes.
The status of all relevant data is always visible to all parties. Once our geotechnical engineer has performed a quality check and provided final approval, the status is automatically updated to ‘completed’ (including in the delivery portals) and an email notification is automatically sent to the project team. Rapid access to accurate, up-to-date data is a game-changer for our clients because they can make informed decisions more quickly with a positive impact on their project schedule.
Our new approach has many notable advantages, including:
CPT data delivery platform
Around the world, the new CPT workflow is used by our offshore and onshore teams as their primary tool for CPT data management, processing, validation and reporting. In November 2021, we performed around 2,000 marine CPTs – and 96 % of them used the new, fully digitalised workflow. Our new approach ensures that we deliver the data and insights required at every stage of the client’s project life cycle, to support informed decision-making and reduce project risk.
We identified three factors that were critical to the workflow’s rapid and successful global roll-out:
We are continuing to enhance the CPT digital workflow and our three priorities are to expand it to include all our in situ test types; improve the metadata flow, to enable different applications to connect and share data automatically; and enhance the performance and useability of in situ test datasets in the overall geotechnical workflow.