Future Shooters: The operation to raise the Kursk taught everyone a
valuable lesson
When the K-141 Kursk submarine went down in 110m of water in the
Barents Sea a year ago, the world looked on in horror. For days it
was unclear what had caused the accident and the fate of the 118
men on board was equally uncertain. After nine agonising days, hope
for the survivors was extinguished when Norwegian divers confirmed
that the hull was full of water.
From then on, the rescue became a mission to salvage the submarine
to minimise any environmental dangers from the broken vessel and to
discover the true cause of its sinking.
Raising the Kursk was always going to be a horrendous task, but
behind the scenes IT was to play a key role in the salvaging
efforts.
The inhospitable waters of the Barents Sea made a salvage operation
a nightmare, while the fragile state of the vessel worried
engineers. Financially, the Russian government was struggling to
find the funds for a rescue.
Diplomatically, the situation was delicate, involving a complex web
of international relations and the touchiness of a Russian
government that many of its people felt had failed to do enough to
save the men or to communicate the true facts of the case.
In all, perhaps the most straightforward aspect of the whole affair
was the technology. And yet the centrepiece of that was some beta
software which most of the principal operators had scarcely even
seen before.
A Norwegian company Halliburton Subsea was chosen by the Russian
government to conduct a preliminary study of the wreck and how to
salvage it, along with Dutch companies Smith International and
Heerema.
Halliburton needed to create a comprehensive plan on how to bring
the submarine to the surface in such a way that any environmentally
hazardous material, such as nuclear fuel from the submarine's
reactors, was rendered safe. And as far as possible, damage to the
vessel was to be minimised, so that rescuers could form an accurate
picture of what had happened to cause the sinking.
The Halliburton team decided the best way to do this was first to
create a computer model. After considering several approaches, they
opted to go with software from Autodesk, and asked the Autodesk
dealer AGS in Norway to assist.
Birger Haraldseid, a consultant at Halliburton who worked on the
project, explained what the company had in mind. "We wanted
visualisation - we had to visualise the salvage operation as a
concept initially, and then we had to use visualisation to further
refine the process," he said.
Although the company works with undersea operations all the time,
this one was rather unusual. Most of Halliburton's projects involve
laying pipelines or cables - this was a badly damaged submarine.
"It was a totally different animal altogether," said
Haraldseid.
The company had to spend more time than usual working out the exact
engineering requirements and visualising them carefully to ensure
they were getting it right.
The team of software engineers were using Autodesk's Inventor 4.0
software, in a beta version. Although it was a beta, the software
was chosen because it was cheaper than alternatives - at £6,000 for
a seat (that is, £4,500 for the software and the rest on a PC), it
came in at a third of the price of standard three-dimensional
visualisation software, which typically costs between £15,000 and
£20,000 (including the price of a workstation).
Many of the team involved had not worked with the software before,
so some had to undergo intensive training. This worked out to be
relatively straightforward, as the inexperienced engineers were
guided by a group of experts from AGS who were familiar with the
systems.
"It was quite easy to use in the end," reported Haraldseid. As the
team was working closely with Autodesk too, beta glitches in the
software could be swiftly sorted out or worked around.
First, the team got together a set of two-dimensional manual
drawings of the submarine from the Russian navy, and set about
digitising them and feeding them into the Autodesk software - first
into Inventor and then into a related program called 3D Studio Max,
a visualisation program sometimes used in the film industry.
This arduous process took 10 days but Halliburton reckoned it would
have taken up to three months using alternative systems.
When this process had been completed, the team was furnished with
the correct digitised construction blueprints of the finished
submarine from the Russian navy. It turned out there were some
significant differences between these blueprints and the original
drawings. So these had to be incorporated into the computer
model.
Fortunately, this turned out to be a simple matter of entering the
new parameters and letting the system calculate the changes. Then
the completed model could be used by engineers to work out how best
to lift the Kursk.
"We did not model every single bolt and tap in the hull, as you can
imagine, because that would have been too much, but we did go into
very fine detail. We also modelled the crane and barge that were to
assist in the lifting," said Birgit Pettersen, sales manager at
AGS.
The Kursk, with 118 crew, was a big vessel - at 154m, more than
twice the length of a jumbo jet, and with a displacement of 18,300
tons. Lifting it up involved a close understanding of the stresses
and strains that would be placed on each part of the vessel during
any lifting process.
For this precarious stage, the complex modelling that the software
team had produced was invaluable.
The 3D model came in handy for other purposes too. When news crews
from around the world converged on the site of the submarine's
sinking to cover the salvage attempts, they found the computerised
drawings useful for illustrating to viewers just what was going on
under the water. The model appeared on numerous television
programmes.
Even though the software was only in beta, it was surprisingly
stable, Halliburton found. "We considered it an excellent tool,"
said Haraldseid.
In fact, the biggest problem, according to Haraldseid, was working
with the Russian government. "The Russians were slightly more
difficult to work with than we were used to in the western world.
They were politically driven. And although the Russian Northern
Fleet was calling the shots, it never signed a contract with us and
never agreed a timeframe. It was changing the goalposts all the
time," he complained.
In the end, the plan from Halliburton was not chosen to raise the
vessel. The Russian government seemed to decide that it was too
expensive and has opted for an alternative plan from a Dutch
company. The £55m salvage effort is carrying on now, with British
divers working alongside Russians to break the submarine apart and
raise it in pieces.
The operation to raise the Kursk has taught all involved a valuable
lesson not just in technology, but in the complexities of managing
a fraught international situation with many partners involved, and
all of it taking place under the intense gaze of the world's media.
For most IT professionals, it is not often that unseen beta
software turns out to be the least troublesome aspect of a
project.
Fiona Harvey writes for the Financial Times