Abstract
Due to extreme environmental loadings and aging conditions, maintaining structural integrity for offshore structures is critical to their safety. Non-destructive testing of risers plays a key role in identifying defects developing within the structure, allowing repair in a timely manner to mitigate against failures which cause damage to the environment and pose a hazard to human operators. However, in order to be cost effective the inspection must be carried out in situ, and this poses significant safety risks if undertaken manually. Therefore, enabled by advancements in automation and communication technologies, efforts are being made to deploy inspection systems using robotic platforms. This paper proposes a distributed networked communication system to meet the control requirements of a precision rotary scanner for inspection of underwater structures aimed at providing a robotic inspection system for structural integrity in an offshore environment. The system is configured around local control units, a fieldbus network, and a supervisory control system accounting for the environment conditions to provide enhanced control of actuators for automated inspection of offshore structures.
Highlights
Offshore structures such as pipelines, risers, and umbilicals require regular inspection and monitoring to assess their integrity, which will lead to improvements in safety and environmental protection and potentially increase their operational lifetime
With health and safety requirements becoming more stringent, the regular inspection of structures is becoming an essential element as part of preventive maintenance (PM)
A hardware configuration for a control system using field technology was presented for a robotic inspection system for offshore structures
Summary
Offshore structures such as pipelines, risers, and umbilicals require regular inspection and monitoring to assess their integrity, which will lead to improvements in safety and environmental protection and potentially increase their operational lifetime. The work in this paper is a contribution towards fully enclosed actuators with on-board local control units including feedback and communication to the main controller This was developed with consideration for the operating environment and, at the same time, maintaining an overall simple configuration as compared to hydraulic or electro-hydraulic systems which are controlled remotely from the topside and have limited dynamic control capabilities. The present work describes the topology adopted for developing a distributed control system configured using a combination of fieldbuses to automate the inspection of underwater structures With this hardware, it is possible to power and control the actuators underwater using a simple umbilical cable consisting of only a power line and a twisted pair for communication signals.
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