ciency becomes increasingly enhanced,
leading to substantially reduced overall
costs.”
With high confidence in the accuracy of
the results at the simulator centre, HMC
optimises complex operations before
their ships leave port. They can test dif-ferent
approaches, in different weather
and sea states, to ensure they are ready
for various conditions on the day.
HMC used the digital twin approach in
establishing installation aids, tugger po-sitions
and clearance for a flare instal-lation
on the Culzean gas field in the
North Sea.
“Heerema has been heavily involved in
the Culzean gas field project,” says Mr
Wossner. “Our client Maersk Oil North
Sea UK Limited awarded us the engi-neering,
procurement and construction
contracts for the central processing
facilities platform, the utility and living
quarter platform, the wellhead platform
jacket, the wellhead access deck and
access ways.”
According to Mr Woessner, while a digi-tal
twin of the Maersk Highlander jack-up
drilling rig helped crews anticipate
problems that might arise in the drilling
of wells, KDI’s simulators assisted HMC
in planning the fabrication, assembly
and installation of the grillage and sea
fastening for the jackets and piles to al-low
“every stage of each process to be
carried out with pinpoint accuracy.”
KDI’s digital twin technology was also
used in the pre-trialling stages of a pro-ject
intended to demonstrate the effec-tiveness
of HMC’s quad lifting concept.
In quad lifting four cranes are deployed
in parallel, simultaneously, as a means
of enabling topside structures to be
built onshore as a complete item during
commissioning, saving significant man-hours
and reducing project costs.
Digital twin technology allowed HMC to
test its quad lifting concept in advance
of actual operations.
The KDI simulators in the Heerema
Simulation Centre were initially used
to assess the feasibility of the quad
lifting procedure before being tasked
with evaluating its practical worth
through subsequent simulation testing.
The tests covered various aspects of
the projected operation, from rehears-ing
communication protocols to ac-knowledging
that human intervention
could impact upon mission outcomes,
and building failure cases into the pro-gramme
to prepare trainees with as
wide a range of scenarios as possible.
Operating in dynamic positioning mode,
HMC’s semi-submersible crane vessels
Balder and Thialf performed a suc-cessful
quad lifting trial in the Gulf of
Mexico in October 2018. Plans are now
under way for what HMC is calling “the
ultimate quad lift,” with a combined lift-ing
capacity of 34,000 tonnes, with the
firm’s Sleipnir semi-submersible crane
vessel – the largest ever constructed.
“It effectively opens up a whole new
array of possibilities from the commis-sioning
and design phases of jackets
and topsides onwards, leading to a situ-ation
whereby these structures can be
routinely installed on all types of foun-dations,”
says HMC chief executive
Koos-Jan van Brouwershaven.
Other HMC projects where KDI’s digi-tal
twin has delivered enhancements
include a FEED study for the instal-lation
of a 1,000-tonne module on a
floating production unit, where con-cept
design of bumpers and guides,
verification of complex set-down be-haviour
and studies of the DP behav-iour
and settings were all explored. For
Statoil’s Peregrino project in Brazil’s
Campos basin, HMC used the system
to test the set-down of several mod-ules,
enabling it to define the sequence
and test concepts with local condi-tions,
among other factors.
The system is also being used to test
applications such as a new back-load-ing
project which had never been car-ried
out before. With no data available
from real-life operations, HMC was
able to receive accurate verification
of all aspects of the job, from concept
design of the cones and receptor, and
improved workability within the design
concept, to weather limitations and
alignment of engineers and operators.
“Our in-house Simulation Centre can
adapt a variety of 3D models, such
as the jackets and topsides for the
Culzean gas field project, to our clients’
real component characteristics,” says
Mr Wossner. “Three-dimensional draw-ings
are produced by our engineering
department and uploaded to the Simu-lation
Centre system, after which off-shore
crews can perform a dry-run of a
given operation, co-operating with the
client and our project team.”
PHOTO: Verification, testing and training prior to mission is carried out in KONGSBERG’s K-Sim Offshore
Crane simulator at HMC, to improve safety and efficiency in the often demanding operations.
n
PHOTO: From the actual quad-lift operation, this
shows the four lifts are pictured in cooperation.
THE MARITIME SIMULATION NEWSLETTER | DECEMBER 2019 PAGE 11