Offshore Simulation to become an integral part of EIP product design process to help transform subsea lifting

Ecosse IP Ltd (EIP) recently announced a close working relationship with the Office Simulator Centre (OSC) based in Ålesund, Norway.  Dorothy Burke, Managing Director, visited this ground-breaking centre, with the Oil Gas Technology Centre (OGTC) and the University of Aberdeen; partners in the National Decommissioning Centre, Aberdeenshire.

EIP was established in July 2018 and has designed and engineered the Ambient Lifter to support offshore sectors, including decommissioning.  The Ambient Lifter is a subsea lifting device, that can be deployed from a low-cost vessel or with a ROV/AUV, offering controlled subsea lifting to lift objects from 5te to 2400te, offering controllable manoeuvring with the use of either ROV or AUV.

Offshore Simulator Centre (OSC) delivers advanced offshore simulation models to reduce costs, improve efficiency and increase safety for personnel involved in demanding operations.  The OSC has an extensive selection of oil and gas and subsea elements already modelled, including tides, currents, sea states, subsea infrastructure, trees, manifolds, ROVs/AUVs, and a wide range of vessels, cranes, lifting operations and platforms

EIP announced that it is working with OSC to model its Ambient Lifter technology to develop its product range further.  The Ambient Lifter model will interact with all other elements in the simulator to produce animation quality models incorporating the physics of the Ambient Lifter to;

• allow optimisation of the Ambient Lifter design for each project
• enable clients to try out the subsea lift with a model of their infrastructure
• optimise methodology on lifting projects, such as trimming Ambient to balance the centre of gravity for uneven loads, streamlining lift plans, modelling vessel movements and saving operations time
• use the simulator model to predict and minimise the cost of real-life subsea lifting operations using Ambient Lifter
• predict the exact behaviour of the full system in real life excellent for scenario planning, cost reduction and optimisation

With the application of simulation as part of their design process, EIP envisages that this will help to further reduce costs for future offshore projects.

EIP will be collaborating with OSC, the National Decommissioning Centre in Scotland and OGTC to model Ambient Linear for subsea bundle decommissioning.  The new Ambient Linear has been designed for lifting and manoeuvring pipelines and similar subsea objects. The joint collaboration will be modelling a range of different decommissioning scenarios that will address and resolve challenges confronting oil and gas operators.