Fincantieri’s marine automation company Seastema has fitted dynamic positioning systems on two Italian Coast Guard patrol vessels, Ubaldo Diciotti and Luigi Dattilo, which were built at Fincantieri’s Castellammare di Stabia (Naples) shipyard.
The system was installed in retrofit during the end of the warranty activities and is now fully operating as it passed the sea trials.
Seastema said the supplied DP system, SEAS-DPS, was the final product of a research program conducted within the national research project ‘CLUSTER’ in cooperation with Fincantieri’s Naval Business Unit, its Research Centre CETENA and several departments of the University of Genoa among which the Department of Naval, Electric, Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering (DITEN), with the support of the Ligurian District of Marine Technologies (DLTM).
The core of the system is the SEAS-DPS controller, installed in a dedicated cabinet at the back of the wheel house and interfaced with the propulsion system, the steering system, the bow-thruster and the navigation sensors for position/heading reference and wind conditions.
The DP Controller HW is the same used for the Integrated Platform Management System (IPMS) supplied by Seastema for these ships, with benefits in terms of system integrations and life-cycle maintenance costs. The DP cabinet was already designed to allow upgrading to DP2.
Alessandro Concialini , CEO of Seastema, explains the value of this new project: “It is an important result of Seastema R&D, since it qualifies Seastema as the only Italian company, and one of the few marine automation companies in the world, able to provide a fully proprietary DP system.”
“The Fincantieri Group together with the Liguria research centers are a true pole of Excellence for Naval Ship technology. From a business point of view, this result enables Seastema to compete with a full range of products, one of the most complete on the market.”