Addressing noise control problems within offshore well service equipment from the perspective of an SME

The offshore industry has always been concerned with health and safety issues. Improvements in these areas have been made in this regard, however the majority of these have been related to potentially fatal hazards, such as fire, explosions and the release of harmful gases. Within the EU, noise control has been brought to the fore with recently revised noise at work regulations and these issues have to be addressed by equipment designers. Well service equipment, although supplied to offshore platforms by larger companies are often manufactured and designed by smaller sub contractors, who can lack specialist design skills in areas such as noise control. This can lead to inefficient solutions which struggle to meet increasingly stringent regulatory demands with regard to noise control while still satisfying customer requirements with regard to equipment access and weight. This paper shows how a typical SME (Small and Medium-sized Enterprise) can go about assessing, tackling and integrating noise control into the overall system design process and into the skill set of the design team. This has been achieved via an initiative set up by the UK government to deploy new graduate engineers into SMEs to effect strategic change in these organizations.