New Material Development for Offshore Mooring Chains: High Manganese Steel

Oil and gas industry experiences indicate that corrosion and wear of conventional mooring chain is an issue, which can result in costly pre-emptive chain replacement in an offshore environment. There is a need to develop new material technologies with improved performance over conventional carbon steel mooring chains to improve chain reliability. This paper summarizes the development work on one such material — High Manganese Steel (HMS). A version of this steel has been utilized for superior wear performance at oil sands operation in Canada. This paper describes details on HMS chemistry optimization and lab testing for mooring chain application. In addition, Gleeble experiments were carried out to understand HMS hot deformation behavior and weldability. Development testing work on HMS material has shown promising results in terms of corrosion and wear performance, relative to carbon steel mooring chains.