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OST-Øst-Europa-programmene

Research and education for development and production of ice abrasion resistant offshore concrete structures for oil and gas production

Awarded: NOK 0.20 mill.

The proposed cooperation within research and education will strengthen further development of structural solutions for exploitation of the vast oil and gas fields of the North. At present this concerns the ongoing Sakhalin 2 and Sakhalin 1 projects in the Sea of Okhotsk, in addition the the forthcoming Shtokman field in the Barent Sea. In these fields there is a large need for increased cooperation between Norway and Russa within education and research. Concrete structures in these areas are and will be e xposed to ice, an experience not encountered on the around 20 concrete structures of the North Sea. For this purpose an ongoing activity within the Norwegan Centre for Research based Innovation COIN (COncrete INnovation centre) is investigating the severe degrading forces of sea ice abrading concrete offshore structures. This includes a PhD project dedicated to accelerated laboratory testing and its ability to predict real ice abrasion. Furthermore, an international workshop was arranged, gathering the fo remost experts in this field from Norway, Russia, USA, Finland, Canada, Denmark, France etc. The world wide state of the art in the field was published following the presentations at the workshop in the form of a 181 page proceedings containing 13 reviewe d papers. Contacts were etablished between Norwegian and Russian researchers. The continued project collaboration granted by this project will coordnate ongoing research in the laboratories at NTNU and FESTU were new accelerated ice abrasion tess are bein g developed independently with, so far, very different approaches to the ice abrasion problem. Differences are partly due to different education systems and research traditions (more on ice physics in Russia/FESTU and more on materials- and structural eng ineering in Norway/NTNU-Dept of structural Engineering). Common research activities, publications and graduate courses will be identified and elaborated in this project.

Funding scheme:

OST-Øst-Europa-programmene