Читать книгу Underwater Inspection and Repair for Offshore Structures - Gerhard Ersdal - Страница 9

Preface

All structures deteriorate and experience damage with time, particularly due to fatigue cracking, corrosion and damage from extreme and accidental events. This requires inspections, monitoring and appropriate repair of these structures to be performed to avoid an unsafe condition. Significant research and development work have been undertaken related to typical damage types, inspection and monitoring methods, evaluation of damage, and the need and methods for repair. This book aims at giving the reader an overview of this research and development work in addition to providing current practice in these areas, both to inform the reader about the existence of this work and to avoid unnecessary repetition of research and development.

Since early 1980 the first author of this book, John V. Sharp, has been active in the majority of these research programmes through his role initially in managing the relevant UK Department of Energy research work and later as Head of Offshore Research for the UK HSE. Since early 2000 the second author, Gerhard Ersdal, has had similar roles in managing several research programmes funded by the Norwegian Petroleum Safety Authority. Both authors have specific relevant expertise and have published a number of papers on inspection and repair of offshore structures and both are now actively involved in these areas at the universities of Cranfield and Stavanger, respectively, as Visiting (part‐time) Professors.

The authors have had the benefit of working closely with John Wintle, Visiting Professor at the University of Strathclyde and Consultant Engineer at TWI, in preparing this book and his contributions have made significant improvements to the final text.

This book has mainly been written by using online web‐conferencing and in its later stages this has been forced upon us because of the Covid‐19 lockdown in the UK, Norway and many other parts of the world.

The opinions expressed in this book are those of the authors, and they should not be construed as reflecting the views of the organisations the authors represent. Further, the text in this book should not be viewed as recommended practice but rather as an overview of important issues that are involved in the management of inspection and repair.

The authors would particularly like to thank Mostafa Atteya, Eirik Duesten and Rolf Hanson for carefully reviewing the document and providing many valuable comments. We also want to thank Mick Else and Fu Wu for their efforts in enabling copyrights for essential illustrations. Further, the authors would like to thank Stinger (stinger.com), OceanTech (oceantech.com), BSEE, KBR Energo, Fugro and Atkins (MSL) for allowing us to use their illustrations and Magnus Gabriel Ersdal for drafting some of the figures and valuable input on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The authors would also like to thank the helpful and patient staff at Wiley.

Microsoft Teams, East Hendred, Oxfordshire and Stavanger, July 2020

John V. SharpGerhard Ersdal