Spare Parts 3D partners with Ocyan to accelerate Additive Manufacturing in oil and gas sector
May 10, 2022
Spare Parts 3D (SP3D), headquartered in Paris, France, has partnered with Brazil’s Ocyan to further advance the use of Additive Manufacturing in the oil and gas sector. Using Spare Parts 3D’s DigiPART end-to-end software solution, Ocyan has introduced Additive Manufacturing to its spare parts supply chain.
Ocyan provides solutions for the offshore upstream oil and gas industry and, despite being new to Additive Manufacturing, the company wanted to look at a significant number of parts to evaluate their potential for AM production. In eleven weeks, DigiPART enabled the project team to analyse 17,000 spare parts from Ocyan’s inventory (with no 3D files). Depending on which supply chain issue the team looked at (lead time reduction, minimum order quantity optimisation, simple cost reduction, etc.), the number of viable AM parts totalled up to 11% of the total parts analysed.
Despite there being no 3D files on hand, Spare Parts 3D’s software, DigiPART, and its machine learning-based algorithms allowed the team to process the available ERP/PLM data. Starting with DigiPART’s semantic recognition algorithms, the team managed to structure the inventory into part categories (valve, gaskets, filters, seal ring) and match equipment (eg drilling), as well as the working environment (eg underwater), to establish the functional specification blueprint of each part. With those prerequisites, DigiPART then ran its ‘AM transfer’ algorithm which yielded a set of AM technical solutions for each part.
Christian Darquier, VP sales at Spare Parts 3D stated, “The project with Ocyan is further proof that Additive Manufacturing can create significant value. We were fortunate to have an Ocyan’s team dedicated and driven to push the idea. The key now is to keep driving the conversion of traditionally made part into 3D printed parts where it makes sense. With DigiPART this conversion is made much easier.”
DigiPART’s machine learning-based algorithms are reported to be ‘trained’ on over 250,000 parts, clustered into 2,000 part categories. This is said to have made it very efficient to precisely identify and select the most suitable Additive Manufacturing solutions for the applications at Ocyan.
The Ocyan team took the results from the analysis and used DigiPART to focus first on parts with cost reduction potential and low criticality. This gave way to the first additively manufactured part in the company’s history. What was also achieved by the Ocyan team, beyond the actual building of a part, was the creation of a common framework to develop an AM adoption roadmap for spare parts.
The company now plans to focus on metal parts with a strong lead time reduction business case and with materials the company is comfortable with, such as 316L. It also plans to look at more innovative solutions, such as replacing metal parts with high-end polymers, which could bring significant savings.
Lineu Aguiar from Ocyan added, “This partnership with SP3D allowed us to kickstart our Additive Manufacturing journey and leverage it as a real strategic value driver for supply and engineering. We are looking forward to a continuing partnership with SP3D to further decarbonise our supply chain and increase our savings.”
