We were honored to have Arindam Chakraborty from VIAS3D present at the SIMULIA Americas Users Conference, May 1-2, 2024 in Novi, Michigan.

Abstract

Fitness-for-service (FFS) of oil and gas equipment and facilities is an important engineering activity from perspective of assessing the structural integrity of critical structures. FFS enables the engineer to determine whether the equipment or facility needs a repair, or replacement, or whether it is good to continue for its remaining life. Level 3 FFS approach is used to address the complex cases and requires an engineer to build a finite element analysis (FEA) model of the structure. 

This paper describes a methodology used to evaluate the FFS approach of the deformed tanks under gravity, internal hydrostatic pressure, wind, snow, seismic and external pressure using modern measurement techniques, FEA, CFD and CAD tools. The step of direct import of scan data into CAD software to generate the digital twin of the structure is the approach that is very powerful and eliminates the ambiguity of assuming a surface by an engineer that may not be a realistic representation of the true damaged surface. This paper shows the complete workflow of importing a laser scan data of a deformed storage tank into CAD, creating a realistic surface from the scan data, and importing that realistic surface into CFD and FEA software to perform detailed Level 3 FFS of the tank using Fluid Structure coupled approach.

Acknowledgement: the work was completed in conjunction with a major oil and gas company.

Presenter Bio

Arindam Chakraborty, Ph.D., PE (TX, CA) is a mechanical engineer with more than 15 years of strong academic and consulting experience in solid mechanics and design, non-linear FEA, fatigue and fracture mechanics, reliability analysis. He also has a strong background in project management, business development, technology and software application development. Dr. Chakraborty has strong technical knowledge and working skills in CAE techniques and widely known structural analysis software (ANSYS/ABAQUS).  He has experience in automating complex engineering problems using codes in FORTRAN/C/C#/VBA/Java/Python including GUI and kernel scripts. Dr. Chakraborty has more than twenty-five conference and journal publications and is closely involved with ASME Codes & Standards committee and API task groups.