R/V “Akademik” (owned by BAS, operated by IO-BAS) is a Regional type Oceanographic Research vessel. The main characteristics are:
Dimensions:
- Length – 55,5 m,
- Beam – 9,8 m.
- Draught – 4,8 m;
- Displacement: 1125 t,
- Max. speed: 10,5 knots;
Max fuel consumption: about 4 t per day at service speed. She has four laboratories: – Control room: 4.5 m2 on E-deck; – Computing room: 8 m2 on E-deck; – General wet lab: 9.5 m2 on C-deck; – Wet multi-use lab: 22.5 m2 on C-deck aft. Ship and a Dry measuring lab: 14 m2 + 3.2 m2 on C-deck.
Additionally there are 1 + 1 x 20 feet (spare) – on B- and C-deck, one 10 feet lab. container hold between funnels on C-deck aftship and open workspace of 89 m2 on C-deck which and be used for setting up two 20 feet containers.
The vessel has Universal Cabling System spread from the bridge to all labs and working places for semi-permanent equipment as well as Network Data Communication System – Ethernet IEEE-802.3 – Protocols: TCP / IP + NFS + SMB.
The R/V “Akademik” is the main base for deployment of the Research Submersible PC-8B.
The permanently installed scientific equipment includes: Scientific echo sounders: SIMRAD EA 200 and SIMRAD EK60; weather system: WEATHERPAK® -2000; Chemical dryers and Chest freezer for samples of 200l.
The vessel is equipped with the following scientific removable instruments: Multy-beam echo sounder SeaBat 7111 with PDS2000 software; CTD SeaBird 911PLUS with 12 – 5 l Nansen Bottles SBE 32 carosel; Side scan sonar Klain’3000 with SonarWiz Map post-processing software; Gravity and Vibro corers as well as range of Grabs for sediment sampling; Equipments for hydro-biological sampling and onboard analyses.
RV “Akademik” is the major Bulgarian marine research facility. More than 200 research cruises have been carried out with the RV “Akademik”, 62 of them international. Huge amounts of physical, chemical, biological, geological and ecological data have been collected. RV “Akademik” is included in European ESFRI project EUROFLEETS.
The vessel is in service from 40 years and the time to be replaced with a new modern well equipped research vessel is approachig.
Activities planned: