Long-term industry partners MacArtney, Denmark, and the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at the University of Washington, USA, report the launch of the FOCUS 3 – APL’s latest acquisition in the pursuit of unexploded ordnance detection.

Over the past two decades, APL and MacArtney have worked together on several projects with a comprehensive scope of supply from MacArtney including the TRIAXUS and FOCUS remotely operated towed vehicles, CORMAC winch launch and recovery system with Focal Slip Ring, SubConn connectors and fibre optic cabling; often with MacArtney providing specific system solutions and sensor packages tailored to APL’s specifications.

“Our very good working relationship with the Applied Physics Laboratory has been both fruitful and constructive,” said MacArtney sales manager Lars Jorgensen. “Going back to the delivery of the TRIAXUS vehicle, the APL team contributed with amazing ideas and suggestions for operational details and application setups during the final stages of prototype testing.

“Maintaining this relationship over the years has allowed us to work on several of the MacArtney products together with the extremely skilled and professional team of scientists and engineers at APL. Very often pushing the final product and its application to a higher level.”

APL’s Tim McGinnis, head of the Ocean Engineering Department and senior principal engineer, said: “The Applied Physics Lab has been working with MacArtney and their remotely operated towed vehicle systems since our purchase of a TRIAXUS in 2003. We were pushing the TRIAXUS to its performance limits, and we had some challenges, but we were very impressed with MacArtney’s diligence and commitment to working through them.

“The TRIAXUS has proven to be a very functional and durable system. The TRIAXUS system is easy to customise for different instruments and scientific investigations and is currently being used on a research cruise in the North Atlantic near Iceland. We are currently developing an advanced sonar to identify buried objects, and the FOCUS 3 was a near perfect solution. It provides a good platform for mounting our sonar electronics and transducers, controllable and stable towing and flexible power and data transmission options for a variety of subsystems and instruments.”