HMC Visits Engineering Companies on Oil & Gas Modular Transport
On the 21st of August, HMC visited the United Kingdom to discuss heavy transport engineering and design for transport with Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) and Chicago Bridge and Iron (CB&I). Offshore installation projects are becoming more and more complex and requirements are becoming stricter with each new project.
During the visit, we discussed sea fastening designs, fatigue life and quality procedures to decrease the fatigue damage and extend the lifetime of oil and gas modules transported on heavy transport vessels. Additional fatigue is caused by ships which length over beam ratio is close to 3 in combination with a high beam over draft ratio. This results in stiff motions. Stiff motions result in more accumulated fatigue damage during transport. Thence, this also introduces the phenomenon of whipping which contributes to the non linearities of motions analysis and eventually causes fatigue damage of the heavy transport vessel which will result in higher deflections during transport. The oil and gas modules located on the heavy transport vessels are subjected to these additional deflections, which will results in more fatigue damage on the module itself.
HMC introduced their in house developed Marine Quality Kit (MQK) to measure strains and motions during each transport to assess the fatigue damage over time. In this way, world leading oil companies can guarantee the designed life time of their on– and offshore oil and gas facilities.