Course Description

Offshore pipeline and subsea system reliability is crucial for the safe and efficient operation of oil and gas production facilities. Reliabilities mean that the pipeline and subsea system can perform their intended functions under specified conditions for a given period of time without failure. In this course, students learn to apply theories of reliability engineering to the analysis, interpretation and evaluation of common components with respect to the design, operation and maintenance stages of asset life cycle. The course provides an introduction to the concepts of reliability engineering including time-dependent failure mechanism, physics-of-failure mechanism, reliability measures and assessment for components and complex systems, maintainability and availability analysis. The course includes case studies of failure modelling, reliability assessment and risk analysis from systems and operations within the process, offshore oil and gas and renewable energy industries.

Course Objectives:

By the end of this Course the participant will be able to:

1. Apply the concept of maintainability, availability, component and system reliability in marine and offshore systems.
2. Analyze various technical and operational data to appraise failure and maintenance concepts in reliability engineering.
3. Apply fundamentals of systems engineering to reliability assessment of maritime assets.
4. Explain risk and safety in maritime and offshore engineering.

Course Outlines:

1. Description of offshore oil industry.
2. Offshore risk and reliability management.
3. Methods for characterizing loads and structural capacity.
4. Structural reliability methods and criteria.
5. Context of design and re-qualification of offshore platforms.
6. Description of offshore process.
7. Safety analysis and risk assessment in offshore facilities.
8. Techniques for safety analysis of offshore processing.
9. Quantitative and qualitative risk analysis tools.
10. Equipment safety during offshore processing.
11. Methodology of the offshore processes is the safety system.
12. Methodology steps: Data collection – Probabilistic analysis – Sensitivity analysis
13. Application of methodology to offshore processing system units.
14. Elements of Bayesian networks (BN) model for the compressor unit and their probabilities.
15. Elements of BN model for the Heat Exchanger tubes Failure and their probabilities.
16. procedure for calculating explosion frequency in offshore oil and gas facilities using event tree analysis
17. Summary and benefits of event tree analysis.
18. Failure Data: (Data availability – Typical data sources – Data quality)
19. Estimating Failure Rates from Sample Population Data:
    1. Probability distributions.
    2. The reliability curve.
    3. Weibull distribution.
    4. Gamma distribution.
    5. Negative exponential distribution.
    6. Test for goodness of fit.
    7. Representation of human error in fault tree analysis.
    8. Uncertainty on frequency estimation.