TPi March 2023

operation in the digital platform 4insight ® . This enables engineers to have a holistic overview, easily see the trends over time, and plan operations and adequate maintenance work in due time. In addition, this overview ensures alignment between all stakeholders working with valves and barriers in a user-friendly environment. The system will free up capacity for the engineers that previously spent time on managing the data to understand the situation better and a make decision based on easily available information. The simplified workflow and data management reduces the risk of errors and increases the quality of the data by making it transparent and easy to detect outliers. Consider a case where the operator is deliberating production optimisation. An upcoming operation requires the valve to be temporarily closed to increase the system’s overall production. By checking the past performance of the relevant valve, you may foresee a potential failure due to excessive torque being applied to operate it. Without a system giving you the holistic and complete history of your valve, you cannot find this information effectively, or it may not be found at all. Operating valves without the full status can cause malfunction, leading to devastating consequences. In a different scenario, the status of the valve back in time was unknown, and the most conservative assumption has been to presume the valve had been left open. This judgement reduced the expected lifetime of associated equipment. In addition, the amount of time required to sift through the unstructured information was deemed “not worth it” due to the amount of hand-written documentation to read. Rather than wasting days of engineering time manually reading through logs, the correct data could be found instantly in ValveTrack, providing accurate information, which may result in immense cost and time savings. How it works The ValveTrack digital service is built on the 4insight ® platform, which provides a secure and easy-to-use interface for data capturing, storing and web visualisation. The users always have easy access to the system at any location through a web browser. The access is field-specific, and while sharing the data is easy, the information is always secure. Many corporations have their own IT infrastructure, so 4insight ® also facilitates sharing of information through application programming interfaces (APIs), as this is part of 4Subsea’s standard solution and is a key benefit of the ValveTrack technology. As a result, operators are free to hook onto any stream of raw or processed data and share information with colleagues to discuss and solve problems. 4Subsea’s 4insight ® platform, on which ValveTrack is built, is first and foremost, a digital service providing key decision support to energy operators. The technology enables domain experts to collect large amounts of data and create new insight based on analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Users can choose from a large selection of readily available applications running on the platform and can easily collect and share relevant information where it is needed. In addition, the system enables engineers to do analytics and build their own applications on the same data.

Figure 2: A typical manual workflow

Figure 3: ValveTrack‘s new digitised workflow

Essentially, operators can run the algorithm they require through the service, allowing operators flexibility and to turn their own data into valuable insights. The architecture behind 4insight ® is designed to receive and compute large amounts of data, unlocking its true potential to ensure the best possible decision support for the users. In addition to digital twins of the valves, the system can host an array of other assets such as wells, flowlines, risers and vessels. As a result, the platform helps operators improve data quality and manage the ownership, security, sharing and use of data while simultaneously reducing operational costs and risk. 4insight ® is a multi-tenant solution residing in Microsoft Azure. The future 4Subsea aim to make 4insight ® the leading self-service digital platform for subsea engineers and data scientists. The ValveTrack technology will develop further and incorporate further APIs and build in a planner feature, which will further improve the workflow between engineers of different companies working with the same set of valves. In the specific case of ValveTrack, the technology enables operators and engineers to gauge, analyse and utilise data at lightning speed compared to what has previously been possible. Moreover, with the valve operation management process optimised, the benefits of digitising work processes in the sector are palpable.

4Subsea www.4subsea.com

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TUBE PRODUCTS INTERNATIONAL March 2023

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