Ship Fitting Qualification

Challenge

With ships built in sectional ‘blocks’, pipes are joined with flanges bolted together for a fluid-tight seal. Hundreds such flanged connections are present on a modern ship carrying fuel, seawater, firefighting water through hundreds of kilometres of various sized pipes. These flanges must withstand vibration, pressure, flexing and many strains as the ship is underway to prevent leakage. Rigorous testing ensures safety and durability of pipe connections over the lifetime of the ship. Extremes such as 150% pressure pulsation with over 10 million vibration cycles were required.

Goals

• Enact a partnership with customer’s engineering team and ship classifier to develop test limits and procedures ensuring safety and reliability of pipe connections

• Meet compressed schedule to qualify dozens of pipe flange connection types with an efficient high throughput of testing procedures

• Test pipe flange connections above operating limits and stresses to ensure performance in-service

• Maximize Canadian Content Value – CCV to meet defence program ITB obligations with SMB supplier status qualification

Solution

An integrated engineering team with the ship Prime Contractor, Classification Society, and the ESL Technology team developed customized test procedures with parallel operations to maximize throughput while ensuring fully qualified performance measurements.

Over a period of months tests of 150% pressure pulsation shock, 10 million cycles of vibration/flexing, 400% burst pressure, were carried out on dozens of pipe flange connection types in-house at ESL’s Dartmouth, NS facilities. Full compliance to ship classifier specifications and reporting were completed.

Results

Testing and qualification reporting were completed on time with ESL’s team supporting the shipbuilder and classifier with comprehensive testing, witnessing and reporting.

Building of the ship continued with assured conformance to requirements and resulted in the delivery of the first AOPS Harry DeWolfe to the Royal Canadian Navy in July 2020.