Abstract
Abstract Offshore Petroleum Industry regularly uses automatic control to keep the positioning of floating drilling platforms and, with a few exceptions, floating production platforms. This positioning control system is commonly denominated Dynamic Positioning System (DPS). This automatic control measures the platform position through a gyrocompass for the heading, and a Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) and/or an Acoustic Positioning System for translational displacements. Further, the thrusters installed on the platform hull are the actuators bringing the platform to the reference position. This work presents the dynamics of semi-submersible drilling platform equipped with DPS and coupled with a drilling riser in 3000 m water depth. In addition, a special attention is paid on the drilling operation called well re-entry. During the re-entry, a safety equipment named Blow Out Preventer (BOP) is lowered down attached to the drilling riser, and the BOP shall be connected onto the wellhead. This approaching of the BOP to the wellhead is carried out controlling the floating platform manually, with the help of a camera attached to a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) which shows how far the BOP is from the wellhead. Then, the engaged personnel estimates this distance and changes the reference position of the DPS in order to reduce this distance. In this paper, numerical simulation results for the coupled platform and riser dynamics are featured and discussion about an extra feedback loop that could control the BOP approach automatically in the re-entry operation is presented.
Published Version
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