Affordable Composites in the oil and gas industry

The Affordable Composites project helps the Oil & Gas industry to cope with today's economic situation. Components and processes need to become cheaper to be competitive with today's oil prices. Composite materials exhibit superior corrosion resistance, are lightweight, easily formable and have high strength per weight. These properties can be used to develop solutions that have substantially reduced installation and maintenance costs. In some cases, composites are an enabling technology that make it possible to install deep-water applications or subsea processing. Despite these benefits, the Oil & Gas industry has been slow to adopt composites. The reason is that projects where composites are used tend to be slow, expensive and require considerable resources to do the required long-term testing to demonstrate that they are reliable and safe to use. The objective of this project is to develop simulation tools that will substantially reduce qualification costs of composite materials. The models and procedures will be based on modifications of existing scientific and engineering models combined into a wider simulation approach using multiscale modelling. The tools will be tested experimentally to confirm that they will work in typical offshore environments and applications. Moreover, new processes and procedures will be developed to allow the use of model predictions of material properties in the design and qualification process of composite components. The detailed objectives of the project are: * To develop simulation methods that can predict the long-term performance of composites based on materials models that incorporate fundamental physical principles requiring only a small or reduced number of small scale tests. This will be a significant improvement on today's situation. * To develop a qualification by simulation procedure that will outline requirements to testing and modelling and how to handle uncertainty of the material models. * To develop a modelling procedure to provide guidance on how to apply the new material models to composite component development. * To identify the main cost drivers in composites technology. Cost modelling will be done to focus development efforts on the areas where the biggest cost savings can be made. The project finished in January 2020 with following deliveries * A DNV GL guideline has been published as the main delivery from the project. * A numerical model for estimation of diffusion of fluids into the composite laminate has been developed and validated against the experiment. * A cost analysis of the qualification of composite pipes for offshore application has been performed at DNVGL. * Static and fatigue tests were performed on Glass/Epoxy material in order to verify the results of the predictive models. * Around 1000 test specimens were received from Evonik of Germany and are tested at NTNU for validation of the models. * DNV GL developed a probabilistic Bayesian network to predict the performance of composite material offshore. The network can be used for integrity management of composite structures offshore. * A guideline as an appendix to DNVGL-ST-F119 and DNVGL-ST-C501 is under development at DNV GL. * Carbon/PVDF, Glass/PE and Carbon/PEEK materials will be provided by Solvay, Arkema, Evonik tested at NTNU.

Fiber reinforced polymers for a long time have been considered as an alternative to metallic materials such as steel. Even though the cost saving potential from composite materials is expected to be substantial in the offshore industry, their utilization has been limited and very slow. In the Affordable Composites project, we have been targeting problems related to excessive full-scale testing cost and time as well as environmental effect on composite materials offshore. During the project various methodologies and models for the assessment of effect of environmental exposure and long-term loading have been developed. The development of such models was the result of a working group including NTNU with two PhD student and one test engineer and the industrial group of 17 industrial participants across the value chain of composite components in the oil and gas industry. The results from the project have been published in 37 publications including magazines, journals and conferences.

This innovation will remove a bottleneck for cost efficient exploration of extreme fields, such as arctic, deep water and marginal fields. It will allow using composite materials for such fields in a cost efficient and safe way. The Norwegian offshore industry is world leading in exploring extreme fields, because many such fields are found the Norwegian sector and the experience has been applied to the export marked. Using composite materials (fibre reinforced plastics) in extreme fields has been identified as providing great benefits due to their corrosion resistance, lightweight, easy formability and high strength per weight. This can substantially reduce installation and maintenance costs. In some cases, such as deep water risers (flexible and catenary) composites can become an enabling technology or can provide much simpler solutions without the need of buoyancy. Due to their anisotropy, composites can also be made into strong and at the same time flexible materials to be used in flexible pipes, umbilicals, jumpers, subsea cables, drill pipes etc. Even though composites have all these benefits, they have not been used by the oil and gas industry as much as in other industries. The reason is that projects applying composites are too expensive and composites apparently good properties are difficult to measure and document for the harsh conditions of an oil field. The innovative idea here is: - The main cost driver for using composites offshore is not the pure material costs, but it is the long and complicated qualification process. - Qualification by simulation, based on fundamental science and technology, can substantially reduce the qualification costs.