Seafarers’ perceptions of competency in risk assessment and management: an empirical study

Past analysis of accident investigations suggest an absence of or inadequate practices of risk assessment and management on board vessels. Although the International Management Code for the Safe Operation of Ships and for Pollution Prevention (ISM Code) requires that the risk management process must not only be correctly formulated and implemented but also be periodically evaluated in order to verify that these objectives are attained, the correct and effective implementation and application of the process cannot be achieved without active involvement of competent seafarers on board. Due to the limited investigation of seafarers’ competencies in risk management, the reasons for the inadequacies in the process that are leading to accidents were not evident. Hence, using a survey, this paper conducted a pilot study investigating seafarers’ perceptions of competency in the various components of the risk management process conducted on board vessels. The findings of this paper suggest an overall satisfaction with the risk assessment process. However, there is certainly room for improvement as far as seafarers’ performance is concerned. The findings of this paper provided valuable insights into the current training regimes in the area of risk assessment and management paving the way towards enhanced safety procedures on board vessels.     

Field data observations for monitoring the impact of typhoon “In-fa” on dynamic performances of mono-pile offshore wind turbines: A novel systematic study

For offshore structures such as offshore wind turbines (OWT), typhoon is usually considered one of the most critical threats to structural safety performances and service life due to its heavy wind, wave, and even coexisted storm surge. Meanwhile, it is challenging to obtain the systematic data from the environmental conditions, structural dynamic vibrations and the SCADA record, when typhoon passes by the offshore wind farm. Taking into account these situations, a real-time multi-source monitoring system enabling the investigation of the typhoon impact on the performances of OWT, has been firstly established and implemented to a 4.0 MW mono-pile OWT in Rudong, Jiangsu, China. One of the major contributions in this work is to develop the monitoring system using a unique environment of real-world data that has been synchronously obtained from waves, winds, vibrational accelerations, inclinations of towers and SCADA data during the typhoon “In-fa” passing by the wind farm, and provide the scientific community with the underlying standards and technical recommendations. To investigate the influence caused by “In-fa”, comparison results of the measured data in the range of June to August have been analysed. It is worth noting that two conclusions have been obtained: (1) the region near the nacelle is not always the most critical vibrational area. Actually, the change of the maximum structural response in the position under different external loads should be applied to effectively evaluate the structural safety; (2) the measured accelerations exhibit an obvious decay process in the presence of the turbine rotor-stop, but not the yaw rigid-body motion. This observation promotes the accurate identification of modal parameters for the long-term monitoring. Consequently, these valuable findings to facilitate the assessment of structural operational conditions have been developed into two guide-lines. All the data and analyses presented in this paper provide a valuable insight into the design, energy efficiency, safety monitoring and damage diagnosis of OWT structures.     

Floating non-traditional manufacture of floating drilling storage and offloading units—study on modeling and optimization method for the underwater rotating technology

The purpose of this study is to find proper modeling and optimization method for the underwater rotating technology used in floating non-traditional manufacture of FPSOs. The underwater rotating technology includes the block division in the FPSO bottom and the underwater rotating angle of the uncompleted bottom. The model contains many practical requirements, such as the size of the semi-submersible barge, the area required for drilling oil and gas, the mass of the unit area in the FPSO bottom, the lifting capacity of the factory and the operation space for workers. The model of the underwater technology in the paper would first minimize the number of the rings in the bottom, second minimize the number of the block in each ring, and finally find the maximum underwater rotating angle. The Sevan Driller FDSO manufactured by COSCO (Nantong) Shipyard Co., Ltd in China is employed as number examples in the paper, and the results show the model proposed in the paper is correct and valid, which could provide a theoretical basis for the promotion of floating non-traditional manufacture.