For more than 70 years Aerojet Rocketdyne has conquered some of mankind’s greatest challenges in space, on land and at sea.

It has provided rocket engines for more than 1,600 launches since the inception of the U.S. space program, including the Apollo mission that landed the first humans on the moon. The company’s space shuttle engines helped successfully launch crew and cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) 135 times, a flawless record of success. Its propulsion systems also have played a vital role in placing commercial, military and government satellites into orbit and have powered space-probe missions to nearly every planet in the solar system.

The Mars Curiosity rover is presently moving around the surface of the red planet performing valuable experiments to determine whether life could have existed there thanks to a power source developed by the company’s engineers.

What about the energy industry?

When Aerojet Rocketdyne set up a booth at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston in May, it’s no wonder the most common question was, “What are rocket scientists doing at an offshore oil and gas show?”

The company is using its engineering expertise to reduce downtime by increasing reliability, enhancing safety and developing fault-tolerant operations.

“The aerospace and offshore oil and gas industries have a lot in common in terms of being able to successfully work in extreme environments under the most harsh conditions, including extremely high pressures and temperatures,” said Mike McKeon, program director of Extreme Engineering at Aerojet Rocketdyne.

The rocket engine manufacturer is not new to the industry. For the last 14 years Aerojet Rocketdyne has been bringing its systems engineering expertise to the oil field, helping drillers, operators and equipment manufacturers solve problems and reduce downtime, from correcting drilling systems and dynamic positioning problems to resolving issues with well control systems.

Having already applied expertise to systems spanning the seafloor, production and deepwater drilling rigs, Aerojet Rocketdyne engineers also have served as an objective third party to identify root and contributing causes and recommending systems safety and reliability risk mitigation strategies to address issues affecting the rigs in question.

“Systems engineering takes a high-level look at the program and then orchestrates the overall program,” said McKeon. “You start by looking at a rig as one large system with many contributing systems—the drilling system, the power system, the vehicle-management system. You define the function of each system, document their requirements and then proceed with synthesizing and testing them to ensure they are all integrated and working together. This occurs from the conception of a rig to oil production.”

Space station on Earth

McKeon likened the complexity of a rig to the ISS, which Aerojet Rocketdyne helped design and develop. For example, the power system on the ISS feeds everything else—from the environmental and life-support systems to the vehicle control system. This makes it imperative that the power system interfaces properly with the other systems. This requires control documents—a certain set of detailed requirements and testing. Because robust systems engineering technology was built into the station, it has operated continuously 354 km (220 miles) above the Earth since its first components were launched in 1998.

“Like most everything in the space industry, failure is not an option,” said McKeon. “It’s not like you can call a maintenance truck and have it there within the hour if something goes wrong. Same with a rocket launch. There’s nowhere to pull over on your way to space. All the systems must fit together, work together and be designed correctly. Oil rigs have interfaces that need to be managed in the same way. We bring that aerospace rigor and discipline to the offshore oil and gas industry, where failure also is not an option.”

David Haas, deputy program director for extreme engineering at Aerojet Rocketdyne, used a phone system as an example.

“Consumers demand certain requirements on a phone,” he said. “When it rings, they need to be able to answer it, speak into it and hang up. But the phone also needs to be designed and tested against detailed requirements. Will it work in temperatures greater than 120 F [49 C]? Is it required to work after a drop? At what height? And if it falls in the water, at what pressure will it continue to operate? Detailing requirements is key to testing.”

With increasing dependence on robotics and automation, Haas predicted the offshore oil and gas industry will need systems engineering even more, especially as it begins operating in extreme depths.

Reducing downtime

Aerojet Rocketdyne recently brought its approach to a major drilling contractor that was losing millions a year due to system downtime on offshore rigs operating across the globe.

The problems were myriad—from hydraulic leaks and valve malfunctions to solenoid failures and water seepage in electronic equipment deep below the ocean surface. The contractor contacted the company to identify the root causes and recommend solutions to the issues.

Aerojet Rocketdyne engineers identified several contributing factors, including a lack of upgrades to the baseline system as it began drilling in deeper water and experiencing higher well pressures. In addition, the delivered systems had been built independently of one another, not designed from a concise set of top-level requirements. Furthermore, data from previous incidents had never identified the root causes of the downtime so that the problems could be addressed properly.

Aerojet Rocketdyne engineers provided a systems engineering focus such as working with the contractor to document every state of the system from the beginning of its life cycle to the end. This could include, for instance, recording how many times a valve is opened or closed or the kind of environmental conditions the system had endured, from extremely high temperatures to low pressure. “Those identifiers will ultimately help predict maintenance and repairs before the system stops working properly,” said McKeon. “The team also identified ways to detect, isolate and recover from a system failure much faster. In all, the customer indicated that the systems engineering focus applied by our engineers may reduce system downtime by as much as 40%.”

Aerojet Rocketdyne also is collaborating with Scotland-based Kelvin TOP-SET to reduce cost and potential downtime.

In 2012, for instance, a major offshore production platform was experiencing a problem. The rig had been impacted by failures, resulting in a series of emergency shutdowns. Not only were the shutdowns costly, but they were potentially deadly as well.

Surface and subsurface safety values on its production wells had failed to close, opening the possibility of a chain reaction that could have resulted in catastrophic platform failure, causing a major spill, multiple fatalities, regulatory fines and penalties, and a tarnished reputation.

Aerojet Rocketdyne and Kelvin TOP-SET were asked by the oil company to identify the root causes and recommend solutions to the problems. Together, each company brought its own expertise.

The two companies identified a number of issues. For instance, Aerojet Rocketdyne identified design flaws; data retrieval issues; use of nonoriginal equipment manufacturer parts; and deficiencies in maintenance, internal communications, control-room monitoring, operating procedures, operations readiness and assurance, control instrumentation reviews, risk assessment skills, and staff competence at critical failures.

In addition, Aerojet Rocketdyne identified insufficient understanding of major accident hazards and incident reporting as well as fatigue and difficulties in coping with increasing workloads.

Kelvin TOP-SET’s investigation and root cause analysis, meanwhile, discovered a lack of operational readiness prior to start, work priorities misaligned and insufficient resource capability due to unattractive employee value proposition for remote extreme work locations.

The two companies offered their recommendations, which were implemented, enabling the offshore production platform to keep workers safe, avoid a future disaster and potentially save millions in downtime.

David Ramsay, president of TOP-SET, said he is convinced of the value of using rocket science extreme engineering in the offshore environment.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist,” said Ramsay. “But it helps.”

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