OptaSense shortlisted in Royal Academy Award

OptaSense, a subsidiary of QinetiQ Group plc and provider of Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), has said it is honoured to be shortlisted for the UK’s most prestigious engineering accolade, the MacRobert Award, after the awards ceremony last night.

Synonymous with spotting the ‘next big thing’ in the technology sector, the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert award is the UK’s longest running national prize for engineering. It identifies outstanding innovation with proven commercial promise and tangible societal benefit.

The awards ceremony, which took place last night (Wednesday 2 July) at the Royal Opera House in London, recognised OptaSense’s ground breaking technology that converts fibre optic cable into a condition monitoring sensor for long infrastructure assets such as oil wells, pipelines, railways and roads. The winner was Cobalt Light Systems.

OptaSense provides revenue assurance to these infrastructure asset owners by improving safety and security, increasing their throughput and yield as well as reducing the costs associated with operating these long linear assets. By creating a sensor from the fibre optic cable next to these arteries of global commerce, OptaSense is building The Earth’s Nervous System™. For the first time these assets can be monitored over their entire length, which will mean the world’s energy and transport networks can function more safely and efficiently than they do today.

OptaSense is a platform technology that has applications in multiple vertical markets including oil and gas, subsea, pipeline security, border security, rail and road. In oil and gas, the DAS technology has been successfully deployed in a wide range of onshore applications including microseismic monitoring, production flow monitoring, vertical seismic profiling (VSP) and hydraulic fracture profiling (fracking), and is transforming the industry’s ability to understand in real-time what is happening along the well bore and beyond.

Magnus McEwen-King, OptaSense Managing Director, said: “It is an honour to have been shortlisted for one of the most prestigious engineering awards in the UK. This reflects all of our technical teams’ hard work and reinforces that we are recognised as world leaders in the development of distributed fibre optic acoustic sensing.

“Following the success of our technology onshore, we are currently developing the world’s first fully marinised and qualified DAS system for offshore use in a joint programme with Shell. The system, for the first time, will provide the offshore industry with highly accurate acoustic data acquisition, and will be deployed in water depths of up to 10 000 ft. This again highlights our desire to continually develop this innovative technology.”

Leo Quinn, QinetiQ Group Chief Executive Officer, added: “To be shortlisted for this prestigious Award from the Royal Academy is a further confirmation of QinetiQ’s strategy to build on our technical heritage and drive forward our portfolio of high growth businesses. OptaSense is genuine game-changing technology which I am proud is built in Britain, contributing to both the UK’s export capability and its science and engineering skill base.”

Edited from source by Elizabeth Corner

Read the article online at: https://www.worldpipelines.com/business-news/03072014/optasense_shortlisted_in_royal_academy_award/