Integrated design-analysis system helps manufacturer of offshore drilling equipment seize market opportunities

Company Subsea Ventures, Inc. Industry Marine Location U.S.A. Product Used COSMOSDesignSTAR™ Type of Analysis Linear Static More Details

The Challenge

Subsea Ventures Inc.(SVI) has been a prime vendor of marine equipment, subsea systems, oilfield, and industrial structures since 1986. The company specializes in the custom design, fabrication, assembly, and testing of specialized, highly complex projects, including lifting and handling systems for subsea use in drilling and production applications.

In order for SVI to keep up with the booming oil industry, a well-integrated design and analysis system is required. SVI’s previous 2D CAD system wasn’t able to keep up with the demand for new deep-water drilling equipment. SVI also desired to bring analysis in-house instead of outsourcing as they had done in the past.

The Solution
The company decided to purchase Solid Edge as their CAD system and COSMOSDesignSTAR for their analysis package. Now, when designers have a model that needs analysis, they retrieve the model in Solid Edge, click the COSMOSDesignSTAR icon, and begin the analysis.

In a recent project using the solids-based system, a new underwater blow-out prevention system was completed in half the time the project would have required if the previous 2D design approach was used. Structural analysis was performed on several iterations of the design. This was much more analysis than previously used, since outsourcing was the former way of retrieving analysis. As a result, not only did SVI get a new product to market in half the usual time, they were able to optimize it to a degree that was impossible previously. "As business picks up, cycle time is on all our customers’ minds," says Frank X. Mooney, a senior project engineer at the Houston, Texas-based SVI. "Reducing cycle time is the main reason we moved from 2D CAD to solid modeling. But when we found how easy it is to bring analysis into the design process with Solid Edge (from Unigraphics Solutions) and COSMOSDesignSTAR (from Structural Research and Analysis Corp., Los Angeles, California), we’ve also begun to optimize our products to a much greater extent."

Summary and Metrics:

• 50% reduction in time to market
• Achieved optimization to a degree previously impossible