Failure Distribution Analysis of a Novel Subsea Valve Actuator Concept based on Reliability Database

Abstract

In the Offshore Oil & Gas industry, particularly for Subsea Production Systems, the costs associated with downtime, maintenance intervention and repair of the equipment corresponds to a significant amount of the Operational Expenditure (OPEX). This drives the demand for more reliable equipment, embedded with technologies that enable a Condition-Based Maintenance strategy. Either approach requires a representative knowledge of what can go wrong with the equipment and how it goes wrong during its life cycle. This information can be used both as a decision-making tool, to decide where to improve the reliability and where to monitor for faults, as well as to formulate the design requirements to implement these technologies. When available, historical reliability data of similar equipment under the same typical operation and environment circumstances can be a valuable source to derive part of this information. In this paper, it is presented a systematic investigation of the failure data distribution for a conceptual electro-hydrostatic subsea valve actuator based on data available from the Offshore Reliability Data Handbook.