Study on System Support for Offshore Plant Piping Process Using 3D Simulator

Abstract

An offshore plant is an offshore platform that can process oil and gas resources in rough seas with a poor working environment. Moreover, it is a complex structure with different types of offshore facilities and a large amount of outfitting that connects different offshore installations. In particular, an enormous amount of various piping materials is installed in a relatively narrow space, and thus, the difficulty of working is relatively high compared to working in ships or ground plants. Generally, when the 3D detailed design is completed, an offshore plant piping process is carried out at the shipyard with ISO 2D fabrication drawings and ISO 2D installation drawings. If a worker wants to understand the three-dimensional piping composition in the working area, he can only use three-dimensional viewers that provide limited functionality. As offshore plant construction progresses, correlating work with predecessors becomes more complicated and rework occurs because of frequent design changes. This viewer function makes it difficult to identify the 3D piping structure of the urgently needed part. This study deals with the process support method based on a system using a 3D simulator to improve the efficiency of the piping process. The 3D simulator is based on the Unity3D engine and can be simulated by considering the classification and priority of 3D models by the piping process in the system. Further, it makes it possible to visualize progress information of the process. In addition, the punch content can be displayed on the 3D model after the pipe inspection. Finally, in supporting the data in relation to the piping process, it is considered that 3D-simulator-supported piping installing could improve the work efficiency by more than 99% compared to the existing method.

Keywords

• offshore plant
• piping process
• 3d simulator 3d
• working efficiency
• installation drawing