Welcome
The Ocean Network Seafloor Instrumentation (ONSFI) Project, which commenced in 2007, is a five year multidisciplinary R&D project to design, fabricate and validate a proof-of-concept seafloor array of wireless marine sensors for use in monitoring seabed processes, including applications such as geological imaging and earthquake detection. Individual compact, low-cost sensors, called ‘SEAformatics’ pods, will be self-powered through ocean bottom currents and will be able to communicate with each other and to the Internet through surface master units to facilitate observation of the ocean floor from shore.
The project team includes university researchers from the Faculties of Engineering and Applied Science, Earth Sciences, and Science (Physics and Physical Oceanography) at Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN), the Proponent, and from the Faculty of Engineering at Dalhousie University, as well as fourteen graduate students, two full-time engineers/technicians, an operations and commercialization manager, a technical project manager/engineer, and technical staff from the private sector partner, Rutter Inc.. The ONSFI project has four R&D streams: marine sensors; power generation; communication networking; and final integration of the systems into a working prototype. This project links sensor science, wireless communications technologies, ‘smart’ materials, ocean current power harvesting technologies and web-based information technologies.
The final phase of the project is to integrate the sensor, power and networking sub-projects with the unit’s structural and deployment elements to result in an autonomous ‘SEAformatics’ pod which is ready to be deployed and tested in a proof-of-concept sample array, in situ in a marine environment. The pods will be designed for rapid installation using a free-fall deployment technique, so that a large array can be deployed in a short time period. Targeted completion date is the fall of 2011.