Simon attended a two-day, in-person course at the IMechE’s London headquarters in October 2022. There were around 15-20 other attendees, he says, with a range of experiences, although mainly people at earlier stages of their careers.
In terms of structure, Simon explains about 75% of the course was lecture format, with students taking notes from the instructor. This training covered the basics of piping systems before moving onto the essential theory behind pipe stress analysis, covering materials, mechanics of solids, allowable stresses, design for pressure, primary and secondary stresses. There was also training on piping codes, standards and UK regulations including PED/PESR and the differences between ASME B31.3 and EN 13480 design codes. The other 25% of the time was spent working through industry examples using CEASAR II –a pipe stress analysis software commonly used within the piping industry. Students were given a demo version of the software to download on their computers and were taught how to set up and analyse a piping model. He found it helpful just “understanding the interface”. Although Perenco uses CEASAR II already, Simon had never had the opportunity to set up a model himself, populate it with data, and get to grips with running analysis and interpreting results, so this practical side of the training was “really, really useful”.
He adds that the course in general was “very relevant for me, because a lot of the examples that the instructor went through were oil and gas related”. Many of these demos were similar to tasks he works on at Perenco, so he could apply the learning to his own job.
Learning about the broader theory of pipe engineering was also valuable for Simon. When thinking about which course to apply for, he had considered getting training directly from Hexagon, a global software company who develops and owns the rights to CEASAR II that Perenco uses. However, one of his colleagues had attended that course and told Simon “it was more just about how to operate the software, rather than understanding why you do things”. However, Simon wanted to go back to first principles of pipe stress analysis, to learn about the theory, rather than just the practice of using software. Another advantage is that “you could definitely take away what you learned on the [IMechE] course and apply it to other [pipe stress analysis] software used in the industry”, rather than just learning about one vendor’s technology.