Thermal Insight - Digital Twin Technology for Enhancing Asset Uptime and System Reliability

Abstract

Abstract Thermal Insight, visualized in Figure 1, establishes a new frontier for operators to increase reliability and uptime of SPS systems by avoiding cold restarts. The Digital Twin is a live diagnosis tool that provides critical information about the actual cool down time of critical locations in the Subsea Production System (SPS), in the event of an unplanned shut down. Based on verified Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools, Thermal Insight adopts a holistic full field view and feeds back the actual cool down time in predetermined stringent locations to the operator. This facilitates well informed decision making, opposed to immediate shut down and cold restart following conservative cool down requirements and philosophies. The inner workings of the Digital Twin are a Reduced Order Model (ROM) set of differential equations based on a-priori CFD simulations which reveals the cool down time in critical locations, and not only in the location of installed hardware (PTT sensors). The CFD results are used to correlate the real time temperature readings from the Pressure/Temperature Transducer (PTT) to cool down times in the most stringent parts of the SPS, limiting the number of cold restarts to when it is really needed. This paper will outline the CFD model verification work along with the Digital Twin deployed onto an example scenario based on actual field data from an operator.