Review & Design Support Services

Vibration and Integrity Review; FEED, Project Planning

Vibration creates significant risks for an organization such as piping failures, loss of containment, and machinery downtime. As a trusted adviser and engineering consultancy, Wood – vibration, dynamics and noise (VDN) can help customers identify and mitigate these risks. 

For new projects, including brownfield projects, our Vibration Review and Design Support can range from a few days of advisory services to a longer term strategic support role working closely with different teams. This small investment in engineering support has a large return to your organization. 

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1 Addressing Vibration is a Management Challenge

The consequences of vibration problems are significant and can lead to fire, explosions, injuries, downtime, maintenance costs, and environmental damage. Given these risks, owners are now much more proactive in addressing vibration issues, including vibration-induced fatigue failures on piping and machinery systems.

Vibration cuts across many different engineering functions, including piping design, integrity engineering, rotating engineers, structural engineering, and process engineering. Ensuring the vibration issues are integrated across these groups represents a management challenge. 

This service is a proven approach to ensure vibration and dynamic engineering methodologies are conducted in parallel with the traditional design tasks, including static, mechanical and process design.

The real value of Wood’s role will be to ensure that recommendations are coordinated and integrated with the different stakeholders and a closed-loop process – including site assessment and continual improvement – is provided.

By working directly with the owner, Wood VDN (formerly BETA) can coordinate the advanced engineering requirements.

2 Vibration Review & Design Services - Scope

Wood's technical and advisory services will provide a roadmap and recommendations to minimize vibration integrity-related risks for:

• New Projects such as upstream production facilities (including offshore FPSO or platforms), compressor or pump stations, or downstream facilities (including refineries).
• Brownfield Projects such as facilities expansion or modification, Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) projects, or other situations where rotating/reciprocating equipment is changed.
• Existing facilities where the owner needs to assess its risks or to address ongoing reliability machine or piping problems. This can include commissioning or integrity assessment surveys.

These services include:

• Project review and advice during the FEED or planning stage. This includes piping layout, machine considerations, integrity considerations, and recommendations for implementation during detailed design and commissioning.
• Risk based assessment for a production facility. This assessment uses industry methodologies, such as the Energy Institute Guidelines.
• Design audit
• Assess process changes, layout changes, or structural/mechanical changes and their effect on vibration.
• Site visit to assess risks, which can include assessment of steady state and transient issues.
• Root cause analysis services
• Training on vibration/dynamics
• Or other customer specific needs requiring expertise in vibration and dynamics.  

In this role, Wood provides independent support to the owner and its engineering team. Early involvement can save costly changes later in the design, and avoid expensive field modifications.

While the above services are most useful during the FEED or design stage, we also provide support during commissioning, operations, and life extension phases of your facility. 

MANAGING VIBRATION / DYNAMIC ISSUES - from Design to Operations
	Design - Greenfield & Brownfield Projects			Operations & Maintenance
	Feasibility Definition	Detailed Engineering        Construction	Start-up; Commissioning
Wood VDN's  Role	Define: Risks Specifications Technical Issues Integrated Plan	Piping Vibration & Integrity Structural: Foundation, Structural & Skid Dynamics Rotating Machines: Pulsation, Torsional, Rotor Dynamics, Mechanical Resonance, Pipe Stress Analysis Process, Piping, Reliability: Surge Control Dynamics, Water Hammer, ESD Transients	Vibration & Integrity Inspection (Baseline) Performance Baseline	CBM, Performance Monitoring Troubleshooting, RCA Optimization Reliability Enhancement

3 Wood Advantages

When investing $ millions (or $ billions) into your next capital project, you want to ensure reliability and integrity risks are addressed. Wood’s services will provide the design and operational assurance you need.

Wood VDN’s team has over 1000 years of combined experience in solving complex vibration/dynamic issues. Few if any organizations have this depth of knowledge. 

The combination of our field and design experience is unique, and provides major benefits to our top tier customer base:  

• Wood’s field engineers have successfully solved 1000s of different vibration problems. Field-based experience, on a global scale, is crucial. It identifies real issues that should be avoided in the design stage.
• Advanced simulation, dynamic modeling tools, and other methodologies can be used to evaluate piping and vibration response. This advanced analysis can ensure the design will run smoothly across the range of operating conditions.

Long-term customers continue to trust Wood, including Shell, Chevron, Mobil, Williams Pipeline, Anadarko, TransCanada, CNOOC, PETRONAS, and hundreds of other industry leaders.

4 Related Information

• INTEGRATED APPROACH TO MANAGE VIBRATION
• PIPING VIBRATION AND INTEGRITY ASSESSMENT

5 Key Words

• FEED Study
• Vibration Audit

More Info

Webinar: Shake, rattle and grow I (2022 update)  •   Structural Vibration and Ways to Avoid It  •   Tips for Managing a Successful Vibration Project  •   Example: Offshore Pump Package (Video)  •   Structural Vibration from Compressor (Example) (Video)  •