5 Application Scenarios
5.1 Collaborative Riser Analysis Workflow
An important step in deep-water oil exploitation is the elevation
of the oil from depths over one thousand meters to the surface. Oil
platforms use ascending pipes, called risers, which are tubular
structures that convey oil and/or gas from the wellhead on the sea
floor to the platform’s separator system tanks [Senra et al. 2002A;
Senra et al. 2002B]. To certificate the operation of the risers for
their entire lifecycle (30 years or so), simulations of the stress
applied to the riser system are conducted based on meteooceanographic
data about wind, tide and water currents. Simulations
are made under extreme environment conditions to test
stress resistance. It is important to perform fatigue analysis studies
to evaluate the most critical regions of the risers affected by cyclical
stress in order to guarantee their integrity during their lifetime.
The analysis of risers requires the use of a suite of standalone
programs. Since the analysis process is complex and handles a
large amount of data files, this simulation is very hard to execute
and manage manually. Furthermore, as the output files of one
program are the input of another, it is necessary to make countless
data manipulation and transformation operations using additional
tools or programing new scripts to accomplish these tasks. Not
only is this expensive in terms of time, it can also be error prone.
In this context the use of a scientific workflow to represent and
execute that sequence of simulations is an important feature of the
system.