Welcome

The objective of MOORINSPECT is to develop a medium range ultrasonic in-water testing technology using ultrasonic guided waves method to identify cracks and fatigue in a large closed circular/elliptical chain links in deep-water offshore facilities. Such a technique has significant advantages to the offshore industry such as; ability to detect common types of defects in chain links without the need to decommissioning the chains (i.e. in-situ inspection) nor affecting their prime functionality. This is considered to be a cost effective, practical and time efficient solution. Furthermore, it will be possible to inspect link-cross sections in chain links for potential defects, which is considered to be difficult to inspect area due to the problem of location accessibility.

The development within MoorInspect will focus on adopting a novel NDT approach to scan moor chain links. This is will be through investigating several types of transducers for Medium Range Ultrasonic Testing (MRUT) technique including contact and non-contact methods. The development in this project is extended to produce a mechanised deployment vehicle to inspect those chains, leading to the capacity to conduct periodical inspection to detect progressive defects and fatigues based on historical data gathered from perpetual testing.

The impact of the MoorInspect project once achieved would be far reaching and on several fronts: economical, logistics of operations, environmental and most of all reduction in loss of related human life.