NEW TECHNOLOGIES

Web Page sponsor Oxley Developments

www.oxleygroup.com

22 Sep 08. Northrop Grumman Corporation’s Sperry Marine business unit has successfully completed type approval testing for the VisionMaster FT™ radar systems under the latest international technical specifications. The type approval testing, conducted by the U.K. certification body QinetiQ, verifies that the Sperry Marine VisionMaster FT radars meet all of the new requirements of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 62388 Performance Standard and International Maritime Organization (IMO) Resolution MSC192/79, which came into effect July 1, 2008. The new IEC standards were developed in cooperation with the IMO to simplify and improve the existing standards for ships subject to the carriage requirements under the Safety of Life at Sea treaty. The IEC 62388 document specifies minimum standards for detecting and tracking targets, displaying radar data on screen and interfacing with other navigation electronics.

22 Sep 08. GKN Aerospace offers swift, cost-effective composite repair solution. With the growing use of composites within the airframe, swift and efficient repair services are of critical importance. Combining proven ‘hot bond’ heater mat technology with GKN Aerospace’s experience in composite design and manufacture, the Company has evolved a highly efficient composite repair process that has huge potential for many repair situations. A modification to GKN Aerospace’s 16M long x 3.5m diameter autoclave to incorporate a hot bonder has enabled the Company to implement the ‘hot bond box’ repair process within an
autoclave. This applies localised heat only to the damaged area of the part within the autoclave environment, heating and forming only the section requiring repair whilst the remainder of the part retains its integrity entirely.

22 Sep 08. Quantum3D, Inc. announced the availability of Sentiris AV1. The Sentiris AV1 PCI Express Mezzanine Card (XMC) was conceived to address the ongoing needs of high safety- and security-critical applications such as primary flight instrumentation and multi-level security (MLS) systems. Certifiable to DO-178B for software and DO-254 for hardware, Sentiris AV1 is the first XMC to offer an obsolescence-proof design. This is accomplished by leveraging a field
programmable gate array (FPGA)-based video- and graphics-processing core instead of the traditional approach of using dedicated graphics processing units (GPUs), which are rapidly made obsolete by end-of-life (EOL) announcements.

23 Sep 08. At the 2008 SMM maritime technology exhibition this month, Northrop Grumman Corporation’s Sperry Marine business unveiled the newest enhancement to its VisionMaster FT™ lineup of marine navigation systems – a widescreen high-resolution display with 25 percent more viewing area. Sperry Marine’s WideView™ display console is designed to improve situational awareness for bridge watch officers by providing additional information alongside the radar or electronic chart display and information system (ECDIS) picture. The iWindow display on the left-hand side of the display is user configurable to show split-screen and window inset views of conning information, closed-circuit TV images and other operational modes.

24 Sep 08. Northrop Grumman Corporation introduced a new family of multisensor marine speed log products at the 2008 SMM maritime technology exhibition in Hamburg. The NAVIKNOT 600 series of products, which are being marketed under the Sperry Marine brand, are based on a new satellite speed sensor that yields dual axis speed over ground. The satellite speed log can serve as a standalone device or be integrated with a single-axis electromagnetic or Doppler speed log. The three-way satellite-electromagnetic-Doppler combination provides maximum built-in flexibility and redundancy. The NAVIKNOT 600 systems use a twin GPS antenna array to measure the ship’s heading, v