Enhanced Offshore Operations with Acoem’s EAGLE Wireless Sensors and MV-x Multi-Channel Systems

Country: Norway
Application: Offshore and Maritime

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

An offshore drilling company operating in Norway faced significant challenges in ensuring the reliability and safety of machinery across multiple platforms and rigs. The lack of real-time monitoring for critical machinery like thrusters and top drives resulted in unplanned downtime, high maintenance costs, and increased safety risks.

The Challenge

The customer, a major offshore drilling company, faced significant challenges in ensuring the reliability of critical machinery across multiple platforms and rigs. These platforms and rigs rely on machinery such as thrusters and top drives, which are vital for operational efficiency. However, the customer struggled with the lack of real-time monitoring, making it difficult to predict failures before they occurred, leading to increased downtime, unplanned maintenance, and safety risks.

The potential consequences included:

Unexpected breakdowns, causing operational delays.
Higher maintenance costs due to reactive repairs.
Safety concerns due to undetected mechanical issues.

These challenges negatively impacted the customer’s business, increasing operational costs and affecting productivity and safety on offshore rigs.

The Solution

To address these challenges, the customer turned to Acoem’s cutting-edge condition monitoring solutions:

EAGLE Wireless Sensors: Installed to monitor the top drive on multiple rigs, providing vibration data upon operating conditions of the machinery. The wireless technology made installation straightforward, and the sensors allowed the customer to anticipate potential issues before they caused significant disruptions.
MVX Multi-Channel Online Systems: Deployed to monitor thrusters and other essential machinery, providing constant, detailed insights into their performance and health. This system enabled predictive maintenance to avoid unexpected failures and reduce the need for costly repairs.
Remote Diagnosis and Reporting: Acoem’s partner, IKM Instrutek, provides remote diagnostic capabilities, allowing for continuous monitoring and reporting. This setup allows for fast decision-making and immediate action when maintenance is required.

The Results

The implementation of Acoem’s solutions led to several positive outcomes:

Increased Uptime: Real-time monitoring and predictive capabilities helped the customer reduce unplanned downtime by 20%.
Cost Reduction: Maintenance costs decreased by 15% due to the ability to address issues before they led to major breakdowns.
Enhanced Safety: Early fault detection improved safety by preventing dangerous failures in critical machinery.

In addition to the immediate operational improvements, the success of this project has had a lasting impact:

Stronger Partnership: The success of this implementation has deepened the relationship between the customer, IKM Instrutek and Acoem, with further discussions around expanding monitoring solutions to other assets.
Operational Confidence: With enhanced reliability, the customer has gained the confidence to scale operations and meet increasing demand without compromising safety or performance.