ANSYS > Case Studies > FMC Technologies: Evaluating Cumulative Damage in Subsea Oil and Gas Equipment with ANSYS Mechanical and Scripting

FMC Technologies: Evaluating Cumulative Damage in Subsea Oil and Gas Equipment with ANSYS Mechanical and Scripting

Technology Category

Sensors - Gas Sensors
Sensors - Utility Meters

Applicable Industries

Equipment & Machinery
Oil & Gas

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development

Use Cases

Structural Health Monitoring

About The Customer

FMC Technologies is a global market leader in subsea systems and a leading provider of technologies and services to the oil and gas industry. They help Exploration and Production customers overcome difficult challenges with onshore and offshore drilling, completion and production technologies and services to improve their returns. The company is known for its innovative solutions in the face of complex challenges, particularly in the design and manufacture of subsea oil and gas equipment. Their commitment to value engineering and reducing over-engineering is evident in their approach to problem-solving.

The Challenge

FMC Technologies India Pvt. Ltd. was faced with the challenge of designing subsea oil and gas equipment that could withstand high pressure and high temperature domains. The equipment had to be qualified per ASME BPVC VIII, Division 3, which requires the cumulative damage on the equipment to be below 1. The increasing depth of oil extraction meant that the structural loading requirements for subsea components were increasing, but there were also space and weight constraints on these components. To reduce over-engineering and promote value engineering, engineers needed to visualize damage distribution in each component. However, ANSYS Structural, the technology they were using, did not have a method to plot damage. The challenge was to develop a customized method using ANSYS’ scripting capabilities.

The Solution

FMC Technologies used ANSYS Mechanical or Workbench to determine loading conditions experienced by the product using Finite Element Analysis (FEA). They developed ANSYS Mechanical macros to evaluate cumulative damage as per ASME BPVC VIII Division 3, Article KD 232.1. ANSYS Parametric Design Language was used to customize the analysis to provide for damage visualization. The Macro code wrote an additional .RST file containing the elemental nodal value of ASME’s damage value for each node. The effects of the damage value on the components were evaluated. If any improvement in product performance was required, engineers made informed decisions based on the damage information in the .RST file. ANSYS post-processing tools were used to plot damage and identify areas in the design that did not satisfy ASME Sec. VIII D3 criteria.

Operational Impact

The use of ANSYS Mechanical and scripting allowed FMC Technologies to effectively evaluate cumulative damage in compliance with ASME BPVC VIII Division 3. The ANSYS Macro capabilities enabled evaluation of derived results via scripting. Results such as principal stresses were extracted from the existing ANSYS result files. These were later used as parameters to evaluate limiting tri-axial strain for a material, under a particular loading condition. ANSYS Parametric Design Language scripting allowed for flexibility to compute derived parameters and evaluate cumulative damage. These results were stored in a separate result file and saved for access. This solution provided the engineers with the necessary tools to make informed decisions about product performance improvements, based on the damage information in the .RST file.