The economic consequences of required intervention or deferred production mean that improving system reliability from a thermal performance and structural integrity perspective is increasingly important.

DEEPSEA is providing the advancement of design and analysis tools to meet the challenges of compounding demands including deepwater, HPHT, low energy reservoirs, harsh environments and marginal reserves. DEEPSEA’s advanced engineering services improve technical assurance and ultimately reduce as-installed cost.

Key areas in which DeepSea has advanced the engineering processes for flowline design are:

• On-Bottom Stability – including expansion, lateral & upheaval buckling by employing DEEPSEA’s specialised seabed element that models pipe-soil interaction to more accurately capture pipe-soil displacement resistance relationships both axially and laterally
• Deepwater Installation – including methodology development, detailed analysis and tender evaluation through vessel and operational knowledge combined with engineering capabilities
• Spanning – use of coupled FE-CFD time domain techniques as well as variable shoulder reaction
• Thermal modelling of systems, particularly cooldown with the use of CFD to capture convection and phase change of the product during cooling

For challenging projects with characteristics like ultra-deepwater and HPHT wells, these advanced engineering methods supplement the standard engineering approaches to provide the project team and/or supporting engineering group with the information needed to ensure a safe, reliable, installable and cost-effective solution.

On-Bottom Stability for Deepwater Lines