DeMoPreCI-MDT: Development, Monitoring and Prediction of Coupled Interactions in Material Durability Testing.

In the offshore industry the general problem is that the operational life (the period of economic return on investment) foreseen exceeds the technical lifespan of many components. This results, amongst others, in extensive repair and overhaul costs. For example in the offshore wind industry the operational life aimed at is about 25 years. It is still not clear if this will be reached safely in practice. To cope with this situation, a number of engineering measures are taken to reduce risks, including the use of significant safety factors. This reduces the risk on considerable damage, but increases on the other hand the project cost (CAPEX). Alternatively the sector has learned to live with substantial uncertainty. This is handled by setting up a strict timing of inspection and maintenance schemes, which results in significant operational/maintenance costs (OPEX). The large safety factors result mainly from an insufficient understanding of how certain degradation phenomena (mainly corrosion, abrasion and/or fatigue) interact in causing material degradation. As a result, in design for conditions where 2 or more of the degradation modes are to be encountered together, the individual safety factors are simply combined and even an additional factor to cope with uncertainty may be added. A deeper understanding of the processes governing the operational life under these combined conditions allows making more accurate predictions, thus obtaining cost reductions on both OPEX and CAPEX in numerous offshore projects. The present SBO project, aims at an improved understanding (and prediction) of combinations of the three most abundant damage modes encountered in offshore operations (abrasion, corrosion and fatigue).

Keywords:corrosion, material durability, off-shore, abrasion, material fatigue, prediction models

Disciplines:Control systems, robotics and automation, Design theories and methods, Mechatronics and robotics, Computer theory