Cognity Limited wins Drilling Conductor Design

02 November 2010

Cognity has been awarded a fast-track design project by Castle Rock Engineering Limited (CREL), to develop a new drilling conductor design for use in the Caspian Sea. This project will leverage the advantages of today’s high-end computer simulation and analysis, allowing Cognity to deliver a bespoke engineered solution within a very tight project schedule.

Aberdeen based mechanical design consultants, Cognity, who specialise in mechanical design and advanced analysis, will design and develop the conductor design in-house, using Finite Element Analysis (FEA) simulation and virtual prototyping software from ANSYS. Design by simulation enables Cognity engineers to replace many iterations of traditional physical testing, and allows Cognity to significantly accelerate the overall design process. A single round of qualification tests and land trials are planned for Q1 2011 before the final design enters offshore service in the Caspian.

Rae Younger, Managing Director of Cognity, said “Castle Rock Engineering Ltd has a ground-breaking concept, and we look forward to working with them in developing this into world-leading product. This is an extremely exciting award for Cognity, which I’m sure will be both technically challenging as well as very rewarding. ”

The complexity of the design, in particular the modelling of the conductor soil interaction, requires specialist hardware and software. Cognity will run the high fidelity analysis models on dedicated High Performance Computing (HPC) workstations, coupled with ANSYS HPC parallel processing software. This combination of hardware and software enables Cognity to run large simulations, increasing throughput, and allows Cognity to explorer multiple design ideas – all crucial in making the right engineering decisions early in the design cycle.