The client is an international energy company with a long history, with assets offshore and on land to support the trading of liquefied natural gas, refining of oil products, and operating of service stations.
Seeking to improve safety and productivity from diver or ROV solutions, the company tasked BeeX with the inspection of a single buoy mooring system (SBM), a jetty anchored offshore for the cargo transfer of liquid petroleum products from vessels to rotating buoys.
Hovering AUV A.IKANBILIS:
As SBMs are in offshore areas where dedicated facilities for oil transfers are not available, SBM inspections have been known in the industry to be dangerous but necessary. Without maintenance checks, components of SBMs are subject to corrosion, structural failure, or collapse from structural weaknesses.
However, weather conditions are harsh and unpredictable, creating hazardous conditions for inspection personnel and equipment.
In previous deployments of human divers, they struggled finding optimal weather windows, ceasing most operations due to currents. In result, extensions in project timelines would lead to additional standby costs, amounting to greater total project operational expenses. Further, their methods of inspection were inaccurate (i.e. dropping a weighted down-line and manually measuring the distance from the line to selected points on the SBM to determine the exact shape of the buoy). Data from visual inspections were also reported to not be robust enough.
Meanwhile, the company also struggled with Remotely Operated Vehicles, as they could not fight strong currents while conducting visual inspections.
Ultimately, the client was looking for a strong robotic solution that could perform their maintenance checks reliably amidst harsh offshore conditions.
BeeX’s Hovering AUV A.IKANBILIS, being a fully integrated solution with more sensors and positioning technologies, was then contracted for a trial on its capabilities in assessing an SBM installed at least 30 meters in water depth.
The scope? A 3D scan of a single mooring buoy, anodes, anchor chains connected to the seabed, and buoy’s underside, coupled with a visual scan of a pipeline of the mooring buoy.
A.IKANBILIS was deployed with the client’s vessels on-site, reducing additional costs and CO2 emissions from external vessels.
Then, to the company’s amazement, the Hovering AUV stably fought currents of 1.5 knots while presenting real-time inspection data on Sambal User Interface. In a marvelous feat, BeeX completed the job scope within two hours, leading to an increase in productivity, as divers would take more hours depending on current strengths. The data provided an in-depth overview of SBM’s structural integrity through geo-referenced and layered visual and 3D sonar data. Shortly after deployment, all data was available on Sambal Portal for the client to access and review.
Commercial divers would have struggled to inspect anything greater than 30m in depth due to the risk of strong currents and entanglement. And while there are alternative robotics technologies such as ROVs that are non-human and therefore safer, they still struggle to accomplish the jobs to be done due to their lack of strong current-fighting capabilities.
Ultimately, BeeX’s Hovering AUV addressed both problems. It captured meaningful high-quality data while managing to work with the real conditions of SBM assets.
With BeeX’s A.IKANBILIS, a new era of underwater inspections capabilities is unlocked with reliable, robust, and stable technologies.
