Red Spider Technology (now Halliburton) designs, manufactures and supplies innovative down-hole solutions to the global oil and gas industry. As part of the design process, the company asked Wilde Analysis to perform finite element analyses of a pipe assembly segment.
Summary
The simulations were conducted using ANSYS structural mechanics software. The original geometry was imported from the customer’s supplied CAD data, and further modified and meshed in ANSYS. Due to symmetry, only half of the assembly was modelled.
Constraint equations were specified to allow for the effect of the symmetry plane and the pipe end fixtures. The results were verified with manual calculations where possible. Numerous loading scenarios were considered in order to account for the normal operating and extreme working conditions experienced by the assembly.
Business Benefits
The simulation work provided verification of the operational reliability of the design, consistent with maintaining safety and minimising downtime.
The project allowed us to check the integrity of complex shaped parts, where hand calculated values would be approximations at best. It allowed us to detect areas of high stress concentrations that would have been difficult to pinpoint in any other way. It gave us confidence in our design which in reality will not be expected to work at the extremes of pressure and loading that we investigated during the FEA analysis.
Red Spider Technology (now Halliburton)