Engineering Dissertation

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CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

A Structural Response is study before an incident as a safety assessment to check the designs possible failure. It is also studied after an event as an incident investigation. Explosions can damage the structures:

Bend, break, or displace load-bearing panels, posts, and beams, possibly causing structural collapse

Distort and possibly rupture pressure vessels. Pipes,valves, and instrumentation, releasing hazardous (toxic or explosive) materials into the environment

Create fragments which can travel long distances, causing facility damage and bodily injury.

Figure 2.1 Overview of accident experiences for offshore platforms worldwide (WOAD, during 1980-96)

The platforms which have been established since twenty years comprise over sixty percent of the fires and approximately sixty percent of the severe wounds on the board in platforms in the year 2009. An increase of one percent in the age of platform results in an increase of 0.3632% in the proportions of accidents. Almost after sixty years, in accordance with the records of the government, the West Cameron 45-A platform is the platform functioning since the longest in the Gulf of Mexico in the federal waters. Out of over a hundred structures constructed in the decades of 1940 and 1950, one is yet operational. This platform which has been able to sustain through the decades has gone on a major fire and seven hurricanes of category 2. On the fourth day of December, in the year 2009, a seriously putrefied pipe that connected the structure to a gas well having a high pressure ceded in duration of the usual maintenance, discharging volatile natural gas into the atmosphere. Dissimilar to majority of the contemporary platforms, this one did not have any distant switch for shutting off. The crisis values which must have interrupted the gas flow did not appropriately close mechanically (Ben Casselman, 2010, Aging Oil Rigs, Pipelines expose gulf to accidents, the wall street journal).

In the fourth month of the year 2010, the noxious detonation of the Deepwater Horizon drilling assembly started out a vicious clash over sub aquatic oil drilling on the board massive, contemporary art vessels. However this argument has greatly neglected something which according to several experts might be a greater hazard, that is, the distressed condition of the offshore infrastructure which continues to exist even a long time after the drilling of wells. Almost half of more than three thousand platforms of production in the Gulf exist since twenty or more years, and another dates back to the 1970s or so, a long time before the establishment of the contemporary standards of construction.

Approximately half, in accordance with the federal regulators, have been in operation for a longer period of time as compared to that intended by their designers. Those platforms which age up to twenty or more years made up almost sixty percent of the fires and almost sixty percent of the critical injuries on the board in platforms in the year 2009. The platforms are exposed to recurrent hurricanes, corrosive salt water, and acute ocean currents. Platforms, dissimilar to the drilling rigs that are movable, ...