Syntactic Polypropylene (sPP) Subsea Thermal Insulation Compounding and QC measurements

摘要

Bonded subsea thermal insulation is a valuable technology within the wide spectrum of tools used to ensure thermal management and thereby assure product flow within the offshore oil and gas industry. Many and various materials are available for use in subsea insulation and syntactic systems based on epoxies, polypropylenes and polyurethanes have been known for many years. The use of syntactic materials at great water depth; however requires the material to have considerable compressive strength in order to withstand the hydrostatic loadings it is subjected to. Accurate and prompt measurements of material properties are needed to assure insulating performance. Some of the established measurement techniques suffer from significant deficiencies in accuracy, repeatability, and cycle time exposing manufacturers and owners to schedule risk. This paper discusses aspects of material choice, compounding, property measurement and a novel approach to property prediction for glass syntactic polypropylene capable of addressing both glass breakage and entrapped air level in the system – two of the main determinants of system performance.