Marine Evacuation & Recovery System

In the FIRST-project SSRS have shown that efficient recovery of people in distress can be made lifting davit launch liferafts by crane up to ships arriving at the scene of an accident. The project aims to find a way to do this while still maintaining the improvements that have been made for evacuation. A person evacuated to a liferaft is not rescued, we have to go from Marine Evacuation Systems (MES) to Marine Evacuation & Recovery Systems (MERS).

The concept combine small liftable liferaft units into larger systems, where each unit have capacity for 32 persons. The unit size is set to keep the total lifting weight under 4 tons since many ships already have cranes that can lift that.

The units work as a liferaft in itself but should be kept into sections of 4 to add stability and reduce consequences if something should happen to one of the units.

For the raft units, two concepts with some sturtural differences have been developed. The first concept is a fully symmetric raft, which provides the best stability and safety in sea. Using this reversible structure however makes it more expansive, why a budget alternative also was added. This budget units strenghts is its low price a slightly better behaviour when towing.

Symmetric Unit

Budget unit

The MERS concept is safe, multifunctional, and efficient.

Safe: because people in distress can be protected inside the units during the entire rescue process

Multifunctional: all parts are used for recovery as well as evacuation, there is no need for an additional system.

Efficient: the first ship at the scene can lift 32 persons at a time, a process SSRS have shown can be done under realistic conditions in just 5 minutes.

The concept could provide SAR personnel and crew with adequate tools to perform their jobs and thus fill a large part of the capability gap in mass rescue operations.

If a manufacturing partner and sufficient funding can be found the next phase of the project is to build and test a prototype.