Engineering Strength to Survive the Storm
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.