North Sea hotel module is safe as houses

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jul 15, 2002

A new accommodation module on the Dunbar drilling rig in the North sea is protected against fire and gas risks by Trusted, ICS Triplex's critical safety control and shutdown technology.

A new accommodation module on the Dunbar drilling rig in the North sea is protected against fire and gas risks by Trusted, ICS Triplex's state of the art critical safety control and shutdown technology.

The hotel module had to be designed and built to a very tight timetable in order to have the precariously short summer weather for the installation and commissioning.

The platform operators, Total/Fina/Elf Enterprises, decided to upgrade the "people on board" (POB) capabilities of the rig when it was realised that the underlying hydrocarbon reserves were far larger than previously thought.

This meant that the platform which had previously required a support vessel to provide the additional accommodation would become self-sufficient.

"We won the order in mid November", says Tony Davies, ICS Triplex's project engineer for Dunbar.

"And from day one we were aware of the need to have the F and G system complete within the project time scales, to ensure that the system and module were ready to be loaded onto the barge on time".

Part of the reason for selecting Trusted for the critically important role of continuous monitoring for danger was because the Dunbar rig itself uses ICS's predecessor system ICS 2000 and there is a seamless migration path between the two technologies.

Trusted is based on RunSafe 3-3-2-0, a unique proprietary fault-tolerance technology, in which 64bit processors give 1msec sequence of event resolution to provide unrivalled systems availability by multiple-level assessment of possible fault signals.

This means that spurious alarms are virtually designed out, so that unnecessary evacuations and production shutdowns are highly unlikely.

The Trusted system in the accommodation module is hardwired to the existing ICS 2000 system on the production platform, so that they work together in a completely integrated way.

While fire could break out on the accommodation module, the main gas risk is leakage for the production platform.

"The module provides a home from home for about 32 personnel, so the Trusted system is actually fairly modest in size", explains Davies.

"However, its interface with the ICS 2000 makes it a large and sophisticated system.

The system has its own graphical display to provide the operators with an interface to the field equipment.

We have also incorporated a Fireman's matrix to provide a F and G overview of the new accommodation module".

Unique amongst critical safety systems Trusted has the ability to distribute intelligence throughout its architecture, right down to individual I/O modules.

This reduces data traffic, speeding up response times and enhancing reliability.

This ensures that every point in the Dunbar accommodation module enjoys the utmost in uncompromised protection.

Despite its incredible performance Trusted is very user friendly, being programmed in the popular IEC1131-3 configuration languages, and communicating to other control systems via a dual redundant Modbus link, OPC and open Ethernet networks.

Trusted is certified by TUV for AK6 applications, the highest possible rating for fault-tolerant systems.

As well as oil and gas drilling, it is used for power generation; in hydrocarbon processing plants; for transcontinental gas distribution, and even in rocket launch control.