Offshore staff
HOUSTON – Pulse, an Acteon company, has designed, manufactured, and installed a motion and strain monitoring system to verify the design of the first lazy-wave steel riser system to be installed in the Gulf of Mexico.
The monitoring program atAnadarko’s Constitution spar in the Green Canyon area of the Gulf of Mexico started in 2012; it has enabled validation of the riser design against analytical models and also verified the riser system integrity during a hurricane event.
The entire monitoring system was designed, manufactured, and delivered in less than six weeks.
The system involves Pulse’s proprietary INTEGRI sensors, which are in clusters in two critical locations of the riser: the hang-off and touchdown zones. INTEGRIpod motion sensors record three-axis acceleration and two-plane angular rate. Data are recorded locally and downloaded for post-processing after sensor retrieval. INTEGRIstick stand-alone strain sensors measure the change in riser curvature in two planes.
Wolfgang Ruf, vice president of Pulse Structural Monitoring, says that the system provided accurate response measurement during Hurricane Isaac in 2012, validating that the riser system’s motion and strain were within the boundaries of the initial design and confirming the integrity of the riser system.
11/04/2014
