For Viper Innovations, collaboration, diversification and innovation go hand-in-hand when it comes to maintaining the electrical integrity of equipment.

The U.K.-based company, which recently changed its name from Viper Subsea, has added to its technology arsenal a topsides electrical power module with remote subsea system testing and monitoring capabilities. The technology, called V-Supply, was the result of an in-house brainstorming session that aimed to find ways to help operators cut costs and improve efficiency.

“The driving benefit to the operators is that it eliminates the need to send an additional technician offshore to perform the tests,” Neil Douglas, managing director for Viper Innovations, told SEN. “We also saw the benefit of including a number of additional Viper technologies into the V-Supply to provide a very cost effective solution that offers substantially more over and above that of a traditional electrical power module.”

The technology, which can be used for brownfield and greenfield developments, is being released as the oil and gas industry continues to rebound from a downturn that forced many to rethink traditional ways of doing business. As focus has increasingly shifted to technology to improve operations, many have adjusted their business strategies, formed partnerships or made acquisitions to beef up their offerings in hopes of boosting bottom lines.

Viper Innovations is no exception as it looks to enter other markets while maintaining its subsea footing. V-Supply is the subsea application of a platform, CableGuardian, which is being tailored for use in other industries.

New Technology

The company’s latest offering combines some of the technology made available through its August 2016 acquisition of a 33% stake in LiveWire Innovation Inc., a Utah-based company known for its spread-spectrum time domain reflectometry (SSTDR) technology. SSTDR essentially gives operators the ability to detect electrical faults in copper conductors in umbilicals without stopping operations.

Viper, which specializes in subsea distribution technology, saw the SSTDR technology as a good fit with its own integrity monitoring solutions, including technology that monitors the insulation material around copper in cables.

“The combination of the two means we can measure and monitor the integrity of any electrical cable,” Douglas said. “We have integrated that technology into V-Supply” as well as a couple of other Viper technologies.

The company described V-Supply’s remote testing capability as a novel technology proprietary to Viper. It’s unique in that it “allows the subsea system to be tested in situ without the need to make wire disconnections in the topside rack,” Douglas said. “It also means that specialized personnel do not need to be mobilized offshore to the power module to perform testing. Testing can be undertaken remotely and then the test results can be analyzed by specialists at Viper Innovations.”

An array of measurement parameters, such as for transient faults and harmonic distortion, can also be monitored with data “stored for trending and prognostics to give early warning of faults and to provide the operators with the best information regarding their electrical assets,” Douglas added.

Viper also has tapped into the artificial intelligence and data analytics arena to predict subsea equipment failures before they occur with V-Sentinel. The machine learning software also enables operators to conduct maintenance when it’s needed—conditioned-based, rather than on a preset timeline.

“What we’re looking to do is take costs down for the operator,” Douglas said.

Diversification Efforts

Although the software—a collaboration between Viper, oil companies and universities—is being applied to subsea equipment, it is capable of being put to use in other industries.

Viper is targeting the railway, defense, airport and nuclear industries, the impetus behind the company’s name change in November 2016. Its investment in LiveWire could open doors.

“Part of that investment was to consolidate their technology with our own to provide a product that has applications in a wide range of industrial markets,” Douglas said.

CableGuardian was one of the first technologies that combined LiveWire’s SSTDR technology with Viper’s integrity monitoring product. CableGuardian locates insulation and conductor faults. Although the product was developed for the oil and gas sector, plans are to move that technology into other industries, he said.

For the railway industry, the technology’s remote electrical monitoring capabilities have the potential to reduce delays related to electrical cable failures.

“Clearly, it will be further improved; hopefully, if we get the volumes up, the price will come down for the oil and gas industry,” Douglas said. The diversification push was partly driven in response to the downturn. “Both our industry and other industries will benefit with diversification of our technology into different industries,” he said.

Viper has about 18 patents and directs about 35% of its engineering efforts to R&D, according to Douglas.

—Velda Addison