A fully operational deepwater offshore basin was recently completed on the new campus of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China. On the occasion of the opening ceremony of the China Deepwater Offshore Basin at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the Deepwater Offshore Technology Symposium 2008, DTec 2008, was held in Shanghai, China on 17-19 November 2008. It is a precious opportunity for worldwide experts, scholars, engineers and consultants from academia and industry to exchange information and views on deepwater offshore technology, to discuss new concepts and state-of-art technologies for deepwater exploration of petroleum and gas.
The symposium was jointly organized by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, and Texas A&M University, USA and sponsored by DNV Software. Pål Dahlberg, Sesam product manager, was invited to give a keynote speech during the symposium. His presentation gave an overview of the comprehensive functionalities Sesam has for offshore engineering analyses, with the emphasis put on the capabilities for coupled analyses and how the software may be applied in a verification method together with model basin test to actually extend the model basin capabilities.
Pål Dahlberg giving a keynote speach
For deep water offshore field development, there is a growing demand for advanced analysis tools. In particular, analyses of floating offshore installations require a coupled analysis approach, capable of more accurate global motion predictions. DNV Software has for this reason developed the coupled analysis capabilities accounts for non-linearity in both loading, geometry and material and is capable of automatically including the important coupling (feed back) effect from mooring/riser systems on the global response of the floating vessel itself. Putting advanced computational methods into a modern software environment and also providing efficient algorithms for response statistics have yielded a state-of-the art engineering tool feasible for qualification of deepwater floating facilities.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University is the first academic user of Sesam in China, and the collaboration between them and DNV has been sound for years. Their new basin is 50m in length, 40m in width and 10m in maximum effective water depth. A large area movable floor allows the flexible modeling of water depth from 0m-10m. A deep pit in the basin with 40.0m total water depth allows the modeling of water depth up to 4000m for vertically moored structures. A secondary movable floor in the deep pit also allows the modeling of intermediate water depth. A large span X-Y direction carriage is over the complete width of the basin. Various ocean environments can be simulated in the basin. ‘our laboratory has used Sesam for years, it has been sharp in our research work’ says Prof Run-Pei Li, director of the State Key Laboratory of Ocean Engineering.
During the symposium, a sightseeing boat trip along the Huang Pu river in Shanghai was arranged at night. Stone Zhang, DNV Software regional manager Asia Pacific, held the welcome speech on behalf of DNV as sponsor and the organizer to all participants. All the guests enjoyed the boat trip with beautiful Shanghai bond shining along the way. “I’m glad to see that Sesam has played a key role in China offshore deepwater development, we look forward to strengthening strategic collaborations with CNOOC and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and hope to have more innovative joint industry project in the near future” said Stone Zhang.