Maintaining Technical Integrity of Petroleum Flowlines on Offshore Installations: A Decision Support System for Inspection Planning

Oil and Gas (O&G) platforms in the North Sea are facing aging problems as many of the installations have matured and are approaching their design lifetime. Flowlines are used to transport oil and gas well stream from the wellhead to the production manifold. They are categorised as one of the most critical components on a production facility. Flowline degradation takes place due to corrosion and erosion. The deterioration of a flowline may increase the risk of leakages, ruptures, etc., which shall lead to serious HSE (health, safety and environmental) and financial consequences. Any such risks have a direct impact on the O&G installation’s technical integrity as well as the operator’s sustainability concerns. Conventionally, pipelines are designed with safety provisions to provide a theoretical minimum failure rate over the life span. Furthermore, to reduce the risk of failure various techniques are routinely used to monitor the status of pipelines during the operation phase. The existing methods of flowline health monitoring planning requires one to take into consideration the operator’s plant strategy, flowline degradation mechanisms, historical data, etc. A technical condition report is made based on findings’ reports and degradation trends. This report recommends the inspection of a number of points on the flowlines in a certain year using non-destructive evaluation methods such as visual inspection, ultrasonic testing, radiographic testing, etc. Based on the technical condition report, in general for a certain preventive maintenance shutdown, 10 to 15 flowline inspection openings are accommodated as finance, time and resource availability are taken into consideration. However, it is customary to plan to open more locations in a certain inspection package than can be inspected and minimization of such points is at present done on an ad hoc basis. This paper suggests a formal model and a framework to formally minimize the number of visual inspections by executing the plant strategy as well as HSE concerns. The model is derived using analytic hierarchy process (AHP) framework, which is a multi-criteria decision-making approach. The model is developed based on literature, industrial practice, experience as well as real inspection data from a mature offshore O&G installation located on the Norwegian Continental Shelf.

Fatigue Assessment of Welded Joints Taking Into Account Effects of Residual Stress

Residual stress may have a significant effect on the fatigue strength of welded joints. As a non-fluctuating stress, it has an effect similar to that of the mean stress. Recently the International Association of Ship Classification Societies (IACS) has issued Common Structural Rules (CSR) for respectively tankers (IACS 2006a) and bulk carriers (IACS 2006b). The effect of mean stress in fatigue design is taken into account in both sets of rules. However, the treatment is quite different, in particular with regard to residual stress and shakedown effects. In the present paper a comparative study of fatigue design procedures of the IACS rules is reported, with emphasis on residual stress effects. Testing was carried out with longitudinal attachment welds in the as-welded condition. The initial residual stress was measured by a sectioning method using strain gages. Hot spot stress was determined experimentally by strain gauges and numerically by finite element analysis using different types of elements. Fatigue testing was carried out and SN-curves were plotted according to the relevant stress as specified by the rules. In order to investigate the shake-down effect of residual stress, testing was performed for several pre-load conditions which could be taken to represent maximum load levels in a load history. The aim of the study is to contribute towards better understanding of the effect of residual stress and shakedown on fatigue strength of welded joints.

Numerical Analysis of a Floating Body With Two-Dimensional Moonpool Including Piston Mode

In this paper, the potential and viscous flows are simulated numerically around a 2-D floating body with a moonpool (or a small gap) with particular emphasis on the piston mode. The floating body with moonpool is forced to heave in time domain. Linear potential code is known to give overestimated free-surface heights inside the moonpool. Therefore, a free-surface lid in the gap or similar treatments are widely employed to suppress the exaggerated phenomenon by potential theory. On the other hand, Navier-Stokes equation solvers based on a FVM can be used to take account of viscosity. Wave height and phase shift inside and outside the moon-pool are computed and compared with experimental results by Faltinsen et al. (2007) over various heaving frequencies. Pressure and vorticity fields are investigated to better understand the mechanism of the sway force induced by the heave motion. Furthermore, a nonlinear potential code is utilized to compare with the viscous flow. The viscosity effects are investigated in more detail by solving Euler equations. It is found that the viscous flow simulations agree very well with the experimental results without any numerical treatment.

Estimation of Hydrodynamic Coefficients for VIV of Slender Beam at High Mode Orders

The Hano̸ytangen test program was caried out by MARINTEK for Norsk Hydro in 1997. One purpose of this research effort was to investigate VIV response of deep sea risers subjected to sheared current. A densely instrumented 90 meter long riser model was tested in shear current, and bending strains along the riser was measured. Oscillatory part of both in-line (IL) and cross-flow (CF) displacements can be obtained by applying modal analysis on the bending moment measurements. The primary results from the analysis are that the riser is vibrating at high modes in cross-flow direction (10th–30th mode). The response is dominated standing waves for the lowest speed cases and gradually is influenced by traveling waves for increasing speed. For highest speed cases, it is dominated by traveling waves. The vibration amplitude is significantly smaller than for a rigid cylinder under equivalent conditions. Inverse force analysis estimates hydrodynamic forces from measured response of a slender beam. The method has previously been applied to rotating rig test data. The response was for these cases dominated by relatively low mode orders and standing wave responses. To understand the stochastic behaviour of high mode VIV response, the method is applied to Hano̸ytangen test in the present study to provide valuable insights by estimating CF hydrodynamic forces and coefficients from displacement time series found from modal analysis of measured strains. The results from this work are presented in terms of CF hydrodynamic force coefficients, excitation region and their variations in time and space. New excitation database is extracted based on the analysis results. They are used in VIVANA to predict the displacement and stress against experiment results.

Response of Pipelines Under VIV: An Experimental Investigation

Pipelines laid on an uneven bottom often have free spans. For cases with long spans, one may have several modes and eigenfrequencies that can be excited by vortex shedding. Furthermore, due to the sag effect of a long free-span, the dynamic properties are different in vertical and in horizontal directions. This causes a complex response pattern in the cross-flow (CF) and in-line (IL) directions. From previous research we know that pure IL response at relatively low current velocities may significantly contribute to fatigue damage. This response type must be studied in addition to the combined IL and CF response. The objective of this paper is to present experimental results from flexible beam experiments where both response types are studied, as well as to present results from an empirical response model for the same cases. The empirical model is based on two types of experiments. The first set of experiments were conducted with a flexible pipe for both single and double span configuration. Pure IL and combined IL and CF motions were observed. In the second set of experiments, forces on a rigid cylinder were measured under forced motions in a current. The motions were found from measurements of cross section in the flexible pipe tests. Hydrodynamic coefficients such as drag, added mass, excitation and damping force coefficients were found and then applied in the empirical response model. In the present paper the results from the flexible beam experiments are presented and also compared with the results from the empirical response model. The results so far are encouraging, but further work and more data are needed in order to have a general and robust response model for combined CF and IL VIV.

Background for New Revision of DNV-RP-C203 Fatigue Design of Offshore Steel Structures

The DNV-RP-C203 Fatigue Design of Offshore Steel Structures is being used by a number of different companies for fatigue assessment of different types of structures. This has resulted in questions to DNV about background for the different sections in the document. It is therefore important that the basis for this document is open to the industry. Quite a lot of the background material has also been published earlier at conferences and in journals. In some situations it has been found that the content can be improved to better suite the industry. The document is presented in an electronic version making revisions easy. Therefore it has been revised several times since the last official presentation of a revision in 2005. The present paper gives an overview of the most significant changes made in the document since the 2005 revision. Some of these changes are already included in the present version of DNV-RP-C203. The remaining changes will be included in a revision dated 2010.

Straked Riser Design With VIVA

VIVA is a vortex induced vibration (VIV) analysis software that to date has not been widely used as a design tool in the offshore oil and gas industry. VIVA employs a hydrodynamic database that has been benchmarked and calibrated against test data [1]. It offers relatively few input variables reducing the risk of user induced variability of results [2]. In addition to cross flow current induced standing wave vibration, VIVA has the capability of predicting traveling waves on a subsea riser, or a combination of standing and traveling waves. Riser boundary conditions including fixed, pinned, flex joint or SCR seabed interaction can be modeled using springs and dashpots. VIVA calculates riser natural frequencies and mode shapes and also has the flexibility to import external modal solutions. In this paper, the applicability of VIVA for the design of straked steel catenary risers (SCR) and top tensioned risers (TTR) is explored. The use of linear and rotational springs provided by VIVA to model SCR soil interaction and flex joint articulation is evaluated. Comparisons of the VIV fatigue damage output with internal and external modal solution is presented in this paper. This paper includes validation of the VIVA generated modal solution by comparing the modal frequencies and curvatures against a finite element (FE) model of the risers. Fatigue life is calculated using long term Gulf of Mexico (GoM) currents and is compared against the industry standard software SHEAR7. Three different lift curve selections in SHEAR7 are used for this comparison. The differences in riser response prediction by the two software tools are discussed in detail. The sensitivity of the VIVA predicted riser response to the absence of VIV suppression devices is presented in this paper. The riser VIV response with and without external FE generated modal input is compared and the relative merits of the two modeling approaches are discussed. Finally, the recommended approach for VIVA usage for SCR and TTR design is given.

A Master S-N Curve Representation of Subsea Umbilical Tube Weld Fatigue Data

In this paper, some of the available duplex and super-duplex stainless steel umbilical tube fatigue data are analyzed using an equivalent nominal stress range parameter, which shares a great deal of similarity to the one used in the 2007 ASME Div 2 Code. The proposed fatigue parameter consists of nominal stress range, a size correction term RTt with RT being the tube radius and t being tube wall thickness, and a stress ratio term (1 − R) with R being applied stress ratio. With it, the available girth weld fatigue test data are shown to collapse into a narrow band. The equivalent nominal stress range parameter is also shown to be effective in correlating seam weld data collected from seam-welded umbilicals, but with a different slope in log-log based S-N plot. Coiling/uncoiling low-cycle effects can be addressed by introducing a pseudo elastic nominal stress definition. Miner’s rule can be used to combine both coiling/uncoiling effects with subsequent high-cycle fatigue loading.

CFD Simulation and Wind Tunnel Investigation of a FPSO Offshore Helideck Turbulent Flow

The offshore helideck wind flow is usually subject to many interferences. The helideck airspace velocity and turbulence fields are important issues to promote safe helicopter take-off and landing operations. The current work brings some CFD results of a helideck wind flow 3D-field defined by the local conditions and constrained by the FPSO structure. A discussion about the chosen CFD boundary conditions is also presented. These CFD results are compared with the wind tunnel model-scale velocity and turbulence measurements. The wind tunnel measurements were performed with use of two different techniques: Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and Constant Temperature Anemometry (CTA). The British standard CAP437: Offshore Helideck Design Criteria is examined and suggestions are made herein. The CFD simulations were conducted using the ANSYS CFX software.

Comparative Reliability Analysis of FAST-Pipe™ and All-Steel Pipe

Fiber Augmented Steel Technology Pipe (FAST-Pipe™) is being proposed as an alternative to high strength steel (grade X80 or higher) for high pressure gas transmission pipelines. The FAST-Pipe™ is manufactured by wrapping dry fiberglass on conventional steel pipe. It offers many performance and cost advantages. However, as with any proposed new technology, it is required to achieve a reliability level at least equal to the conventional all-steel technology. This paper summarizes the results of a burst failure probability analysis. It was part of the ongoing work to experimentally and analytically establish the design basis for FAST-Pipe™. The purpose of this study is to estimate the burst failure probabilities of defect-free all-steel and FAST pipes after 30 years of operation, and to identify FAST-Pipe™ design cases which can achieve burst reliability levels comparable to those of an all-steel design. The results of this study suggest that a safety factor of 2.0 on burst pressure is adequate for the FAST-Pipe™.