Jim Smith, Engineering Manager, Eagle Alloy, Inc.
Shelly Dutler, Client Development Manager, MAGMA Foundry Technologies, Inc. (Now Principal, KE Collab, LLC)
In the fall of 2007 two major hurricanes hit the Gulf of Mexico and tipped moored oil rigs. As a result of this, the mooring systems were redesigned to address the severity of these storms and provide an increased level of safety to keep the rigs afloat. The world’s leading provider of mooring systems approached Eagle Alloy, Inc. to produce the redesigned mooring socket, part of the oil rig mooring system. The socket is a 400 pound low carbon, low alloy steel casting, and one rig may use 40 sockets. During initial production, cracks appeared during riser removal and were located in the vicinity of the riser contact. Weld repair was allowed but very costly and time consuming. The customer requested that the finished castings must be delivered to the gulf in the spring of 2008 to retrofit the oil rigs before the upcoming hurricane season.
For those foundries that do not have MAGMASOFT® casting process simulation, when time is short and a problem is large, a group of foundry engineers may get together and brainstorm many possible solutions for a symptom (shrink, inclusion, cracks, etc.) of the problem. Those possible solutions are taken to the shop floor and tried, either in combination or one by one. This can be expensive and time consuming and a valuable opportunity for education is lost. Once the problem is solved, the team disbands and everyone is off to the next issue. This is not the approach that Eagle Alloy, Inc. uses to tackle their issues. [DOWNLOAD CASE STUDY]
