Customer's Challenge

An offshore floating structure located in Panama needs a new key component to be changed out to remain operational. The new component is going to be fabricated in Europe and shipped over to replace the malfunction set at site.

The component is connected to 3 welded pipe joints and hence the x, y and z axle’s distances and angles among the 3 flanges are important to ensure the replacement part being fit in seamlessly. Due to the inadequate of measuring tape in getting GD&T for the new component, a lot of at site remedies like grinding, rigging and modification were needed to force the replacement component in place; this induced unnecessary downtime and extra logistic preparation due to last minute resources needed in foreign country to turn around the offshore structure to operational status.

Solutions

Consider the GD&T requirement and space constraint on the afloat structure, Metal Machines decided to deploy one senior technician equipped with API Laser Tracker for this tasking. API laser tracker is chosen as it has the smallest form factor and high portability as compared to other brand.
Using the Spatial Analyser software which is connected to the laser tracker, our senior technician studied the digitalized data and present different graphical view to discuss with the site representative instantaneously.

Benefits

The scope was completed within 2 days with 100 times accuracy improvement as compared to using measuring tape to conduct the dimension checks. Other than the distance apart, the laser tracker also measured the Pitch Circle Diameter of the bolt holes, bolt holes’ orientation and surface flatness of the flanges and other key dimensions to compare with the as-built drawings. All these the digitalized data collected enable our client to easily determine the GD&T requirement for the new component for machining and hence prevent any last minute modification needed to carry out at site. All these factors help to bring down the cost of this turn around project.