AIMS provides lifetime maintenance support for West African floaters
Marie-Francoise Renard - Bureau Veritas
Three newbuild floating production units recently were delivered for Total projects offshore West Africa. All were covered from conception by Bureau Veritas’ VeriSTAR AIMS Asset Integrity Management System.
The first was the 2-MMbbl FPSODalia built in Samsung, Korea, and delivered for use off Angola early last year. That was followed by the 2-MMbbl FPSO Akpo and the FPU Alima, both built at HHI in Korea, for duty offshore Nigeria and Congo, respectively.
Planning for the lifetime support of these major floaters was part of the project from the outset. As the team at Bureau Veritas (BV) classed the units, they were able to populate the AIMS database, the core of the system, from day one.
Information collected during building may become vital later in the unit’s life. The major benefit of doing things this way is that AIMS plugs the gap between the project team and the teams responsible for in-service maintenance.
With almost all offshore projects there is difficulty in passing full information from the project team to the operations team when the project people move on to the next newbuild. The volume of plans, documentation, reports, and the variety of formats they come in all create headaches for operators.
FPUAlima now on-site for Total off Congo.
BV’s VeriSTAR AIMS tool is essentially a database married to an inspection system and a set of analytical tools — all Web-accessible. Over 95 major FPSOs and FPUs currently use some part of VeriSTAR AIMS, as do owners of smaller units such as buoys.
For some offshore operators it is a useful way to centralize, store, and access information about their assets. With these new floating assets, Total has gone further to derive the maximum benefit of the system by building a lifetime inspection plan with feedback into it.
The FPSODalia was not only the first vessel to be covered by AIMS from conception, but also the first in which the topsides were integrated with the hull for structural analysis, classification, and inspection planning.
For this project, Total contracted BV to model the hull and topsides together, and to develop a risk-based inspection program for both. It is simpler that way to see the conservative scantlings the hull needs to cope with the topsides from the outset, and also easier to build a comprehensive and efficient inspection plan.
Akpo FPSO will be on-site for Total off Nigeria.
AIMS was developed initially to help offshore companies handle the mountain of paperwork and records delivered with offshore units. This is one way of making sure everyone in the company can access the data.
The system also encourages a common, systematic approach to saving information. So plans, inspection reports, thickness inspection data, maintenance reports, photos, and so on will follow one format and be equally accessible via the Web anywhere they are needed.
AIMS also can benefit when operators choose to take on other modules and build it into a comprehensive system. They can visualize class-based inspection plans, add their own planned maintenance systems, or put in place a full risk-based inspection program. All of that feeds back into the database to maintain a full record of the unit’s structure, and also to help refine inspection and maintenance plans, with one objective — to cut out downtime and unexpected problems.
Users of AIMS can identify the ways in which facilities may fail to deliver their intended performance, and can assist implementation of appropriate, effective, and efficient plans to prevent these failures. The AIMS strategy is based on a continuous improvement cycle in which periodic review of the results leads to refinement of ongoing inspection programs and identification of timely maintenance actions.
3D viewer should enable easier visualization of structural data in VeriSTAR AIMS.
Soon AIMS users also will benefit from a new graphical visualization tool that provides a 3D view of the unit’s structure, with hot spot mapping, access to all thickness reports, inspection reports, and photos of each part of the structure. Users will be able to walk through the unit on-screen to see what has been done, as well as what needs to be done and where.
With the 3D viewer, the level of detail will be tailored to the operator’s request and will depend on who populates the database. Those major units covered through the newbuilding stage such asDalia and Akpo will have a full history from the plans, through building and welding and testing to in service inspections. It will be easier to use and on-site managers, regional managers, and headquarters will all be able to see the same thing and to discuss issues of concern without paper traveling around the globe.
During 2009, VeriSTAR AIMS will be extended to cover fixed offshore installations, following feedback from BV clients. A new Structural Integrity Management plan is being incorporated to build on BV’s experience as a certifying body, marrying that to its marine experience.
