Oil production takes place not only on land and in shallow coastal waters but also on the high seas. In shallow waters such as the Gulf of Mexico production platforms are firmly anchored to the sea-bed. In deep-sea applications, where oil exploration platforms can tap into deposits at depths of up to 3500 m it is not possible to anchor the platforms.
Oil exploration platforms suitable for the high seas must keep their position above the bore hole with engine power in spite of wind and currents. Position must be kept accurate to a few metres with engine power so that the boring rods do not break. The highest demands are placed on the operational reliability of the dynamic position control because should the platform drift off position there is the danger of great environmental damage and downtime. Converteam designed a control system for the Transocean Sedco Forex platforms that meets the highest safety demands. As well as other safety precautions the control components are designed with multiple redundancy and networked with fail-safe fibre-optic cables.
The Sedco Express oil platform
Platform position is recorded by satellite with GPS and by sonar buoys fixed on the seabed. The platform position is maintained by powerful electromotors on the four corners of the platform. Each of these 7 MW motors can rotate through 360°. The dynamic position maintenance control system and the associated Fieldbus network must meet high realtime and reliability requirements.
For the Transocean Sedco Forex express class platforms Converteam required a bus system that would operate in realtime, provide error monitoring and alarm indication and be error tolerant such that no single point of failure would render it inoperational. The system was required to maintain a positioning accuracy of better than 5 m in ocean currents of up to 3,5 knots, wind speeds of up to 60 knots and wave conditions of up to 9 m. The solution Converteam opted for comprised World FIP Fieldbus protocol running on an all-fibre network with four hierarchically structured Fieldbus rings and incorporating Hirschmann's fibre-optic cable repeaters.
Some of the reasons for this selection were the high realtime capability of World FIP, the capability of Hirschmann's LWL repeater ring and very fast switchover time on ring failure.
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