The design power of Onshape is helping a UK collaboration find a faster solution to harvesting seagrass meadows.
Conservation charity Project Seagrass and Tandem Ventures have joined forces to design, develop, build and test a new automated underwater harvester that will cut and collect seagrass seed pods.
This process – traditionally carried out manually by divers – is essential for restoring seagrass meadows, which quietly sustain marine life, capture carbon faster, cushion coastlines from erosion, and provide safe nurseries for countless species.
A harvester prototype, featuring a datalogging ‘brain,’ was launched after several iterations in Porthdinllaen Bay in Wales, one of Britain’s most precious surviving seagrass meadows.
The testing was limited to a short test harvest to prove the concept worked whilst causing minimal impact, with a handful of seed pods successfully collected by the new harvester pump-filter system.
“The aim is to make harvesting seagrass seeds 100x faster than the current methods, in which scuba divers collect them one-by-one manually,” explained Sam Rogers, co-founder of Tandem Ventures.
“Tests were promising with a radically increased collection rate, and this has given us the confidence to go away and look at refining the prototype, including upgrading the pump.”
He continued: “With seagrass restoration initiatives in operation worldwide, the team at Tandem hope the implications and learnings from these trials will have a global impact.”
The entire autonomous harvester was designed collaboratively in PTC’s Onshape, a cloud-native CAD and product data management platform.
This meant the team could collaborate seamlessly from anywhere – logging in from laptops on the road, in workshops and on boats, without lugging around hefty high-spec workstation PCs.
