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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Energy Res.
Sec. Process and Energy Systems Engineering
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fenrg.2024.1430894
This article is part of the Research Topic Process and Energy Systems Security-Safety in the Energy Transition View all 3 articles

Performance assessment of subsea safety systems subject to heterogeneous failure modes and repair delays

Provisionally accepted
Emefon Dan Emefon Dan Yiliu Liu Yiliu Liu *
  • Faculty of Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Subsea production systems operate in harsh and hostile environment making them subject to degradation which leads to failure. This is also the case for the final elements of safety instrumented systems (SISs) that installed for protecting subsea production systems.As a result the classic performance assesment methods of SISs that assume constant failure rates may not be realistic for subsea elements, which may experience both random failures and natural degradation. The location of subsea production also provides challenges for accessing the system to perform repair, this often results in delays before repair following revealed failures. In this paper, we explore all these issues by developing formulations that incorporate degradation and random failures as well as repair delays to assess the performance of the system. The degradation of the system is modelled with the Weibull distribution while the exponential distribution is used to model the random failures. The impacts of different maintenance strategies on safety are also explored with case studies.

    Keywords: safety intrumented system, hetoregenous failure, Performance assessement, Subsea production, Safety integrity

    Received: 10 May 2024; Accepted: 23 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Dan and Liu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Yiliu Liu, Faculty of Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.