The weight of the light ship, the weight of the ship without fuel, passengers, cargo, water, etc. on board, is a significant part of the total weight of any ship and managing it ensures safety and regulatory compliance.
Controlling a ship’s weight is vital and structural. Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) integrity management provider Marine Technical Limits (MTL) has developed a new digital platform called PYXIS to transform data from disparate sources into actionable insights, using cloud technologies.
This is important, as the data produced by the inspection and maintenance of floating offshore structures, such as FPSOs and floating storage units (FSUs), over a lifetime of more than 15 to 20 years is considerable. The system also supports operations management models that often operate remotely and use contractors.
PYXIS Lightship can be used for all types of floating or fixed assets, from FPSOs to floating offshore wind turbines. The platform supports operational, limited weight and fixed assets through a single controlled dashboard interface.
Tracking Deadweight Changes
Calum MacLean, Founder and Project Director at MTL, says: “Whether intentional or not, there has been a trend over the last 10 years to manage assets based on risk, using smaller teams and less resources than before. Industry needs the digitization of entire processes rather than just results data in order to meet these needs.
“The ability to securely manage these processes and the resulting data while working remotely, even from home, is now an expectation rather than an optional extra.”
Inspectors produce an enormous amount of data and media, but they may not be available to clarify their findings. Hull structures have few markings to help the inspector point out the location of a find.
MTL overcomes this by guiding the inspector around the tank, with standardized drawings and 3D models to avoid re-inspection.
Using PYXIS is simple and not time consuming compared to other processes and the user can easily create and manage weight changes. As a result, challenges such as process monitoring, data entry errors and overweight safety issues.
“Elements of PYXIS can be deployed incrementally and sometimes independently to meet future asset needs and plans,” MacLean says.
“PYXIS Integrity Management can be applied to only manage inspection data for a specific tank on a vessel, but can then be extended to assess anomalies, provide 3D and VR visualization of results, compare inspections histories, create inspection plans, provide an overview of assets, plan future inspection, re-inspection and repair activities.”
“There are many systems on the market to handle deadweight, but so far very few to handle light shifts – offering easy setup, intuitive interfaces and robust design, all developed in conjunction with the team experienced MTL Naval Architect,” says MacLean.
In the cloud
Other features include detailed revision history and support file storage and access to authorized users from anywhere in the world using cloud technology. Additionally, traceable lightship weight management practices obviate the need for interventions such as deadweight surveys and tilting experiments that take place when data is lost.
Sources of this data include routine inspections, repairs, remotely operated underwater vehicles, drones, and third-party inspectors/contractors.
“Operators of offshore facilities no longer have large operating teams with low turnover, so they can rely on individual knowledge to gather all the information needed to make integrity or safety decisions. future planning,” says MacLean.
PYXIS is designed for floating offshore asset structures, recognizing risk-based inspection at the inspection task/functionality level rather than subsystem or system level. Some hull integrity management systems start with a structural analysis model of the hull, but PYXIS manages integrity by monitoring deterioration mechanisms/reported condition.
The company is developing the PYXIS product to include real-time data capture from remote inspection tools, integrity risk tools, and deployment of inspection plans to remote tablets, enabling verification and streaming results from on-premises tablets to PYXIS in the cloud.
The tools were developed for floating offshore oil production installations, but the same principles apply to floating offshore wind installations.
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