One of the things that came out of the meeting with BP, was that the engineer from the company that manufactured the umbilical had insisted that the friction figure (used in all the engineering calculations) that had been issued by his company and verified by BP was in fact wrong. Instead of being 0.15, it should in fact have been 0.11. Now this may not appear on the face of it to be a large difference, but as it’s used as a co-efficient it results in almost a 40% difference at the end of the calculation process. Anyway, we conducted a series of tests with varying degrees of ‘success’. I wont bore you all with the details but from what we observed during the initial problem and the tests that we conducted we came to a number of conclusions:
1. The Cast Metal Pads grip a LOT better than the plastic ones.
2. The friction figure quoted by the engineer was absolutely bang on.
3. Our equipment does exactly what it says on the tin.
