From today onwards it will be open for operation: the test area a few sea miles off the red sand stone rocks of the Test Center for Maritime Technologies at the island of Heligoland, Germany. ICBM is a member of the research consortium, initiated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials (IFAM) in Bremen. The syndicate wants to bring future maritime technologies to application maturity in using the centre’s facilities.

Besides IFAM and ICBM, the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht Centre for Materials and Coastal Research (HZG) and the Jacobs University Bremen are further members of the interdisciplinary research consortium. Moreover, it is scientifically supported by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven.

In summer 2019 already, after founding the centre, land-based logistics were set up. Now, eight yellow buoys mark its test area of three square kilometres, which reaches down to 45 metres in depth in this sector of the North Sea. From now on, researchers and cooperation partners from industries and sciences will have the opportunity to test underwater technologies under real conditions.

Physicist Prof. Dr. Oliver Zielinski, head of the Centre for Marine Sensors (ZfMarS) and of the research group on Marine Sensor Systems at ICBM, looks forward to using the new options, “the Heligoland testing site will be particularly valuable to us, as this opens a whole new world of research perspectives in the offshore area“. According to him, the results to come will perfectly complement the findings referring to coastal regions, attained by employing the Coastal Observatory Spiekeroog (COS).

^{Visualisation of possible uses of the testing area [Drawing: Fraunhofer IFAM]}  

The testing area near Heligoland will help to put into practice developments in manifold areas of maritime technologies referring to, amongst others, innovative measuring techniques and mobile robotics. “We will, for instance, have the opportunity to assess the role of the delicate sea surface layers that form during calm weather conditions, in accumulating contaminants,“ says Zielinski, „and what is more,“ he adds, “submarine discharges at the sea floor can be simulated by experimental setups in order to test the reliability and endurance of newly developed sensors from ZfMarS, mounted to autonomous underwater vehicles“.

Fraunhofer IFAM press release