Case Study: Technip achieves longer life for deep-sea umbilicals with Dassault Systemes (Abaqus FEA)

Abaqus FEA helps Technip engineers custom design umbilicals for deep offshore oil and gas wells

Technip (DUCO Ltd.), a world leader in designing and manufacturing deep-sea umbilicals, faced the challenge of ensuring these lifelines survive extreme pressures, temperatures, fatigue and very high radial crush loads during Vertical Lay System (VLS) installation. To predict complex, nonlinear interactions in the umbilical’s helical structure and avoid costly on-site failures, Technip turned to Dassault Systemes’ Abaqus FEA for realistic simulation and design validation.

Using Dassault Systemes’ Abaqus (Explicit and Standard) and a custom FEMUS Python automation, Technip automated 3D and 2D model building (producing a run‑ready model in ~10 minutes), ran half‑million‑node simulations on CPU clusters, and validated results against four full‑scale physical tests. The FEA matched test trends within measurement tolerances, showed residual tube ovality stayed below the 3% DNV limit for all loads, and enabled confident virtual prototyping, optimization and reduced reliance on costly physical testing.

Technip

Ian Probyn

Senior Engineer, R&D