ARE YOU SEEKING SURETY IN BUCKLE MITIGATION BUOYANCY DESIGN, MANUFACTURE AND DELIVERY?
Established in 1980, Balmoral has an enviable reputation across the world for product design, development and delivery.
With 500+ people based at our purpose-built 250,000ft2 facility in Aberdeen, we build successful relationships with clients working with them from concept development and advice through to product design, manufacture, testing, delivery and support.
All managed in-house to give total safety, quality and scheduling control.
BUCKLE MITIGATION BUOYANCY SOLUTIONS
Overview
If a pipeline is carrying high temperature product it is inevitable that expansion will occur along the steel pipe. Although the pipe may expand in diameter, most occasions see the pipe increase significantly in length. If both ends of the pipe are fixed this longitudinal expansion can potentially transform into a buckle situation with catastrophic results.
To mitigate this phenomenon pipeline design engineers incorporate pre-determined buoyant zones along the pipeline so that expansion, or buckle, is allowed to take place in a safe and controlled way. These buoyancy modules are designed to maintain their integrity as the pipeline “bends” during installation and operation.
Balmoral distributed buoyancy modules are based on high performance syntactic foams which are designed to meet exacting performance, strength, and installation project requirements through life of field and in water depths of 100-4000msw.
In a typical 25-year design life, buckle mitigation modules may travel over 15km of sea bed as the pipe oscillates through expansion and contraction. For this reason the external shell must be highly abrasion resistant and materials such as polyethylene, elastomer or GRE are ideally suited to this purpose.
Balmoral’s unique range of clamping systems is used in conjunction with its distributed buoyancy products ranging from integral clamps, particularly suited to steel pipelines and umbilicals, to a patented composite clamp design for flexible flowlines as well as steel and composite stop collars.
