Tell us about DSA Ocean and the markets your company serves?
DSA Ocean is a Canadian ocean engineering company based in beautiful Victoria, BC, where we’re grateful to be working on the traditional lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples. The company was founded by Ryan Nicoll and me because we’re both passionate about computer simulations and how they can be used to drive innovation and manage risks in industries like aquaculture, fisheries, oceanography, and naval architecture.
At DSA Ocean, our main focus is to understand the marine environment and how it interacts with all sorts of marine equipment, like vessels, aquaculture farms, and moorings. We help our clients figure out what kind of weather conditions, waves, currents, and tides their projects or technologies will encounter. And then we help them understand how these conditions will affect their equipment. Many of our clients rely on us to come up with engineered solutions, conduct analysis, and provide software that helps them manage risks and innovate in challenging marine environments.
Tell us about DSA Ocean’s Proteus software…
ProteusDS is a software tool leveraged by marine technicians, oceanographers, naval architects, and engineers for designing moorings, assessing the comfort of vessels, investigating buoy stability, and designing fish farms. This marine dynamic analysis technology is used to create virtual prototypes of ocean equipment. It’s like a virtual wave tank.
It’s mostly used to help companies safeguard their technology—for example, ensure that a particular design is suitable for a location or application—and innovate quickly at a fraction of the cost of sea trials or tank testing.
We focus on making sure that our users don’t have to get lost in hydrodynamic details like drag and added mass coefficients associated with a model—this gets complicated really quickly. Our customers’ time is valuable. So, we focus on building things like parts libraries where we’ve worked on the details. We provide video tutorials and good examples that allow customers to directly benefit from the power of dynamic analysis by making it easier to do.
Our customers subscribe to the software and renew their subscriptions annually. We have various license agreements, the most popular of which is a team licence that grants an entire organization access to the software. This helps organizations avoid the risk of only one employee knowing how to use the software.
What offerings is DSA Ocean providing to the Fisheries & Aquaculture sector?
We’ve worked with some major fishing companies in Canada to help them understand how fishing vessels’ motions impact their fishing. We troubleshoot ways in which they can prevent downtime, snarls of gear, and better design trawls to lower fuel usage and avoid by-catch. We do this in a variety of ways: with computational fluid dynamics (CFD); our own software; tank testing; and a heavy reliance on our customers for their “salty sea” experience and expertise.
In terms of aquaculture, one of our most important services is mooring system design. It’s critical to build sites that maximize the lease area of farmers and build systems that prevent fish escapes, for example. Our consulting team uses ProteusDS to model shellfish, fish, and seaweed farms. We determine anchoring arrangements and engineer the entire mooring system to provide peace of mind to our customers and satisfy regulatory requirements such as NS9415 or the Scottish Technical Standard.
How has ProteusDS helped streamline operational planning?
We recently designed a seaweed farm in Washington State for Pacific Sea Farms and have explored how to build bigger— 100+ Ha—kelp farms with Cascadia Seaweed. Building on our extensive mooring design experience for global leaders, we’re trying to figure out how to scale these farms up economically and also make sure that we know just what will happen in open ocean conditions. We need to understand how the systems change as seaweed grows to further farm design adaptability. ProteusDS is the perfect place to test a design without needing to build it.
The Cascadia Seaweed farm (top) mooring and line system used ProteusDS (bottom) to model and assess equipment loads. (Image credit: DSA Ocean and Cascadia Seaweed)
For a project like this, we consider the immediate conditions of a target location and then determine what the optimal mooring arrangement is as it pertains to ease of installation, low capital cost, and functionality from a seeding and harvesting perspective. Lots of items to balance. Using ProteusDS, you can automate the setup of farms and we were able to accurately dial in the designs by leveraging simulations by testing farm mooring arrangements through different tidal ranges, current conditions, and wave regimes. As a result, we are able to produce engineering drawings of optimal farming systems for the clients that we know can withstand site conditions.
For the commercial fishing industry, how is ProteusDS applied?
For the last two years, we’ve been heavily engaged with Katchi Precision Fish Harvesting. By foregoing trawl doors in favor of hydrodynamically formed floats attached to the net and using sensors and smart winches, Katchi is aiming to revolutionize fishing. The net avoids seafloor scour and can be placed at precise water depths to target specific fish, avoiding by-catch and protecting marine ecosystems. To shape their floats and predict how their system would compare to traditional trawls, CFD and ProteusDS were used to model their nets and determine a system. They needed to be able to iterate on the design in the office, not on sea trials. Visualization of trawl behavior as a result of changes in their float design was key, and ProteusDS was the perfect platform for viewing global performance. Thanks in large part to Proteus DS, Katchi has a working prototype of their first commercial float system and is advancing quickly on their control system technology development.
What is coming up in 2024 for DSA Ocean?
We’re really excited about a software release planned for later this year. With this update, we’re looking at much faster simulations and a much more flexible software infrastructure that’s going to make it easier for us to create products that are purpose-built for aquaculture, fisheries, and other applications. We have also just announced the start of a project with Go Deep Intl with funding provided by Canada’s Ocean Supercluster to create an AtoN buoy + mooring design software add-on for ProteusDS.
To find out more about DSA Ocean and ProteusDS, visit: https://dsaocean.com
This feature appeared in Environment, Coastal & Offshore (ECO) Magazine’s 2024 Summer edition Fisheries & Aquaculture, to read more access the magazine here.
