Tetra Tech, a global consulting and engineering firm, selected BlueView Technologies to provide detailed 3-D, multibeam scans of the outflow “draft” tubes of a hydroelectric dam in Washington to check for obstructions, scouring, and erosion. The outflow control doors were obscured and not accessible to be surveyed with traditional surface-vessel mounted multibeam echo-sounder sonar. Tetra Tech chose the BV5000-1350 3-D mechanical scanning sonar with a portable tripod for the project.

The BlueView BV5000 was deployed from a 12-ft aluminum boat and lowered to the rocky reservoir bottom 65-feet below the surface. Seven individual scans were taken in less than four hours. The 3-D scan data were immediately viewable. Accurate registration of scans into a single, 3-D mosaic were quickly accomplished using BlueView’s bundled software to “snap” together overlapping data and register them with surface-vessel mounted multibeam data.

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