Drilling Simulation Works Hand in Hand With Offshore Crane Simulation to Increase Training Payback

The world is demanding more and more oil. Rig owners and contractors are under pressure to produce more crude and at the same time contain the costs of that production. Cost containment is particularly difficult in harsh environments, where the rig and its workers are at the mercy of extreme environmental conditions.

One way that rig contractors have found of controlling costs is to train drillers with simulators. MPRI, an L-3 Communications company, has had advanced drilling simulators on the market for more than ten years. But up until now, offshore crane training on a simulator has not been considered to be an important issue, even though new rig builds and upgrades to old ones require highly skilled crane operators as well as drilling operators.

The crane operator is one of the first to be hired on an upgrade or new build. The operator is an early stage, permanent employee on the rig and takes part in the last stage of rig commissioning at the yard, lifting modules and heavy equipment into place.

Traditionally, training has taken place on the rig at offshore costs. Those costs can be very expensive because they include helicopter transportation and accommodations on the rig. But the availability of the crane for training on an operating rig is limited only to those objects present for training; this means that the training period is much longer than necessary, driving costs up even further.

One of MPRI’s customers, a manufacturer of offshore cranes, told us, “We want to use offshore crane simulators to train our operators in safe and efficient crane operation. The shortcoming of our existing training system is that it can’t effectively train strategic deployment skills. We can’t use equipment already on rigs and platforms because training eats up the crane hours needed for regular operations. Onshore cranes are just too expensive to operate as training devices.”

Crane-specific Simulators

A typical crane manufacturer can establish a realistic replica of an actual crane cabin, complete with operator’s console, swing-and-boom joystick, hoist joystick, and all the equipment needed in a normal operational environment. The value of training operators in a replica environment is obvious: they are immediately at home the first time they get into an actual cabin.
Different or newer crane models can be simulated relatively inexpensively once the cabin replica has been built. Minor adjustments to the cabin, if any are needed, reconfiguration of the controller, and reprogramming the software are all that is necessary, and these tasks are generally not expensive.

One of the biggest advantages of simulator-based training is that it can effectively train for actions in dangerous or emergency conditions. When a situation requiring quick, skillful action and reactions comes up in real life, it’s reassuring to those involved to know that the crane operator already knows what to do: he’s been trained to deal with this kind of a problem.

A simulator can mimic many kinds of weather, reduce or increase the visibility of the simulation, or simulate dangerous conditions and accidents and train for these kinds of situations. Nobody gets hurt and no equipment is damaged. Motion bases are crucial for such training. They dramatically increase the effectiveness of training by simulating working and environmental forces on the crane. The load on the boom, the elevation of the boom, the speed of hoisting, waves influencing the vessel being lifted from, crane rotation with start and stop, vibrations, simulated collisions, and other forces give motion sensations to the operator can be realistically simulated.

Generic Crane Simulators

A generic crane simulator with a lightweight cabin and a motion base has a good price-to-performance ratio. Light-weight alloys and standardized cyber chairs keep the weight of the cabin down. You can have all the advantages of a motion base without the cost of a crane-specific simulator. Since crane simulators are less complex than drilling simulators when it comes to proprietary software, a crane simulator can more easily be reconfigured to fit another supplier or application.

MPRI can deliver a number of solutions. A typical offshore crane simulator has a vertical field of view of +60° to –80° and a horizontal field of view of +90° to –90°, but these specification can be varied depending on the simulator facility’s space and the type of crane.

Drilling Simulators

Drilling simulators are much more complicated than crane simulators. The number of parameters that have to be simulated is much larger than the number for a crane simulator. However, the theaters of operation for drillers are often simpler because the view out the driller’s cabin window is much more limited than the one out the crane operator’s.

Success in drilling simulation requires extensive cooperation with drilling equipment manufacturers. The simulator software has to implement a number of interfaces with control systems and software that are proprietary to the drilling equipment. Cyber chairs aren’t standardized, and so the physical interface between cyber chairs and software is always different. However, new graphics technologies make the job of producing computer-generated imagery a lot easier, and so it’s possible to implement one simulator for a fleet of similar rigs with almost similar equipment.

Two in One

Given that simulators themselves have long been proven to be effectively cost efficient, in applications as divergent as high-speed jet fighter pilot training, eighteen-wheel truck driver training, and deep-sea drilling operator training, the next step is to contain the costs of simulators themselves. One innovative solution to the crane- and drilling-simulator cost problem is to put both simulators in one 14-meter container with a common instructor operator station. Combing environmental facilities like air conditioning, power cabinets, instructor facilities, universal power conditioners, equipment racks, and office furniture like desks and cabinets results in substantial savings. This kind of dual application trainer usually has two cyber chairs for the drilling simulator and one for the crane simulator. Both have plasma screens for the visual system.

Besides general operations and among many others, the drilling simulator typically trains for:

• pipes, drill collars, bits, casings, and risers
• drilling instrumentation
• trip tank
• mud pumps
• hydraulic power unit
• emergency shutdown
• electrical power system
• top drive
• drawworks
• fingerboard
• iron roughneck
• conveyor or catwalk
• mouse hole
• V-door machine
• anticollision
• crown mounted compensator
• active-heave compensator

The crane simulator typically trains for:

• variable weather parameters and visibility conditions
• variable wind
• variable surface waves and current
• variable subsea current
  
• shadows from active cargo or lifting gear
  
• more than 60 cargoes
  
• two active cranes on a rig
  
• multiple supply ships
  
• deployment of one ROV to position subsea cargo or to use CCTV to view subsea cargo at a distance
  
• two supply vessels or ROVs

Conclusion

Realtime crane and drilling simulators can significantly enhance a crew’s training and provide crucial help to an owner or contractor in managing critical situations safely. Simulator training has proved its worth in drilling operations for more than a decade now, and crane training is catching up. Combining drilling and crane simulators in one mobile unit can take the advantages of simulator-based training anywhere in the world by going where the rig or rig fleet is and being easily and safely deployed there.