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EXPLORATION • DRILLING • FIELD SERVICES SECTION TITLE


DIGITAL DETAILIS KEY


Martin Harrop on saving millions with conductor analysis


12 www.engineerlive.com


T


he design, maintenance and monitoring of key components such as risers and conductors has developed considerably as the


industry has matured. Today, highly developed digital technology is playing a huge part, not only in providing efficiency and cost savings, but also improving the safety of operations.


Conductor and riser systems must withstand all potential environmental conditions, but also need to be designed to contain the maximum pressure expected during operations.


THE NEW APPROACH Te obvious (but huge) benefit of analysing and testing conductor designs digitally is that it can be done very safely onshore rather than trying it out in the North Sea, waiting and potentially dealing with disaster. Any conductor and riser system can be modelled in the virtual world, with nobody in harm’s way. Although this kind of data modelling has been used before, it is advances in the software and processing power that have allowed a huge leap in its capabilities. Tens of thousands of numbers can be inputted, millions of calculations can be conducted, with varying loads, conditions, materials


and so on all factored in, producing far more accurate and less conservative results than ever before. To date, the tendency has been to conduct this kind of analysis later in the development phase. With the plans drawn and the equipment ordered, it’s more often treated as a final check before work commences. Although there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that approach, especially from a safety point of view, a considerable amount of equipment expense and time can be saved if analysis is done early on in the process. Hundreds of real- world scenarios can be modelled relatively cheaply and quickly in the analytical world, pushing the boundaries that would have been too inefficient in paper-based systems. Harnessing this new era of high-


powered computer models removes conservatism from the design stage, because impossible or inefficient options are quickly ruled out or refined. In doing so, more cost effective and streamlined designs have the opportunity to emerge that are still fit-for-purpose.


INTEGRATED TEAMS AND ACTIONABLE OUTCOMES Tis early stage analysis approach has recently been used to tackle a design


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