Development of offshore drilling platform simulation for virtual onboard experience

Abstract

As marine resources have been actively explored, a large number of offshore drilling platforms such as drillships and semi-submersible rigs have been built in many shipyards. The drilling system is the key feature that defines the characteristics of the platform. The operation of the drilling system is usually focused on the tubular handling, hoisting, and rotating systems which are directly handling drilling pipes and risers on the drill floor. Therefore, most of the training simulators have been developed only for controlling the drilling equipment. However, not only the drilling equipment handling on the drill floor, but also compensations systems such as heave compensation system and DPS (Dynamic Positioning System) to reduce the effect of the motion, ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) operation, well control including BOP (Blow-Out Preventer) should be integrated systematically because these systems on the offshore drilling platform are operated at the same time. Therefore, we propose the integrated offshore drilling platform simulation for virtual onboard experience which is composed of a virtual driller's cabin for handling drilling equipment, well control simulator to remove a kick, DPS simulator to control the motion of the platform, walk-through simulator to monitor the operation from the worker's viewpoint on the platform, and dynamic analyses of heave compensation system. All data such as the movement of the drilling equipment, platform position, driller's command, etc. are shared among systems in real-time. The proposed virtual offshore drilling platform can effectively show the various situations that occur during drilling operations.