Military

QinetiQ

Objectives

MOD Aberporth is military testing range first established in Cardigan Bay during the Second World War.  Today MOD Aberporth provides a large secure safety area for the testing of air launched weapons and Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS).

Cardigan Bay

 Aberporth Cardigan BayDue to some very challenging and variable, high resistivity geologies for obtaining operational earths, the objective was to provide a coherent earthing (grounding).

Previous efforts to reach the required impedances had all failed, so a strategy for the UAS sites with a low impedance solution set for each of the locations was developed.

A Study of the Soil structure and resistivity for each of the observation points along the coastline was carried out and recommendations provided for a solution customised to match each location’s particular characteristics was delivered.

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Results

Chem-Rod

Chem-Rod-horizontal-verticalFour of the most challenging sites had Chem-rods installed which overcame the space constraint for deployment, environmental concerns, as well as providing an optimized connection to earth which remained consistently low throughout the changing seasons.

The new ‘stabilised’ low impedance earth enabled reliable operations of UAS observation system to run throughout the year regardless of climatic conditions, when previously this was not possible.

This also meant the client was able to avoid all previous embarrassment due to earth noise, and tripping during testing cycles which had plagued the systems for some considerable time previously.

Key Points:

  • A comprehensive Study of Ground conditions and equipment requirements across multiple sites to enable the choice of cost-effective, lowest impedance, technically feasible technologies.
  • Validation of design solution set performance against actual arrangements installed.
  • Advice on wider roll-out of innovative technologies.
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