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The IES Journal Part A: Civil & Structural Engineering

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Design considerations of a loadout skid frame for a 14,000-ton upper hull structure
L. Y. Cheung & K. G. Foong
a a a

Marine Engineering Services Pte Ltd., 29 International Business Park, No. 07-05, Acer Building, Tower B, Singapore, 609923 Available online: 26 Oct 2007

To cite this article: L. Y. Cheung & K. G. Foong (2008): Design considerations of a loadout skid frame for a 14,000-ton upper hull structure, The IES Journal Part A: Civil & Structural Engineering, 1:1, 83-95 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19373260701620287

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The IES Journal Part A: Civil & Structural Engineering Vol. 1, No. 1, February 2008, 83 95

TECHNICAL PAPER Design considerations of a loadout skid frame for a 14,000-ton upper hull structure
L.Y. Cheung* and K.G. Foong
Marine Engineering Services Pte Ltd., 29 International Business Park, No. 07-05, Acer Building, Tower B, Singapore, 609923 (Received 17 April 2007; nal version received 14 May 2007) The objective of this study is to document the design considerations of a Loadout Skid Frame structure to loadout a 14,000 tons heavy Upper Hull Deck of a semi-submersible platform. It highlights the thinking that goes into the design to satisfy all the design constraints starting from load path consideration, dimension limitation to welding access and material availability. In essence, the purpose of the design is to support the new Jurong Shipyard fabrication method for semi-submersible platforms. This useful skid frame has since been used to loadout two upper hull structures, one in June 2003 and the other in May 2004.

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Keywords: loadout skid frame; semi-submersible upper hull structure; dry dock mating operation

1. Introduction In a highly competitive international fabrication market, the bidder with the lowest bid stands a good chance of winning a job and reducing fabrication manhour plays a crucial role in coming up with a low bid. Using better and up-to-date construction equipment on site or setting up a yard in a cheaper labor cost country can help but using an innovative idea to increase productivity will probably produce the best result with the least capital investment. This study documents the design principles of a skidding structure to support an innovative fabrication method proposed by Jurong Shipyard to fabricate semi-submersible platforms. In the fabrication of oshore structures, one way to minimize fabrication manhour is to fabricate as many items as possible on the ground, then lift them up in the air for nal assembly (Cheung et al. 1998). The lifting capacity of the available cranes in the yard will likely dictate the size of the components that should be fabricated. In recent years, many Oileld Operators have gone further to take full advantage of the savings by fabricating the entire deck structure onshore, then loaded it out in one piece and set it onto a pre-installed substructure by a oat-over method. In this development strategy, they saved both fabrication and installation cost (Gerwick 1986). This oat-over method is not a new technique as it has been practiced in the North Sea for over 20 years. In the North Sea, a super heavy topside deck of a concrete gravity platform is usually fabricated onshore, loaded out

onto two or three barges for mating with a pre-set gravity base concrete structure, and then sailed away to site for nal installation. Recently, Statoil also used the oat-over method to fabricate the Visund semisubmersible platform with a topside weight of 25,000 tons. Mating between the substructure and the deck was done in sheltered water. The dierence between this type of oat-over installation and the standard oshore oat-over method is that the former is done near shore where the weather condition is perhaps better whereas the standard oat-over is done onsite in open sea with a pre-installed jacket. However, both methods involve one xed body and one oating body. If mating were done between two oating bodies, the task would be innitely more dicult. Whether it is component fabrication or complete deck fabrication, the underlined message is that onshore fabrication is the cheapest and the quickest way to do fabrication, since every operation can be carefully controlled and quality can be ensured and hence better productivity and greater cost saving. However, oat-over installation is not always the cheapest as it depends on the availability of heavy installation equipment and the cost of extra steel needed for this kind of operation, for example, the weight of the present Loadout Skid Frame is over 3,000 tons and some of the plate thicknesses are more than 80 mm thick. So far, oil companies operating in this South-East Asia region prefer oat-over installation method for heavy decks; say over 5,000 tons, when big derrick barges are not readily available. In the real world, one has to weigh the cost of this kind of

*Corresponding author. Email: bcheung@mespl.com.sg or www.mespl.com.sg

ISSN 1937-3260 print/ISSN 1937-3279 online 2008 The Institution of Engineers, Singapore DOI: 10.1080/19373260701620287 http://www.informaworld.com

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L.Y. Cheung and K.G. Foong pontoon and the Upper Hull Deck. The pontoons would have been pre-positioned inside the dry dock prior to loadout (see Figure 4). (3) The center-to-center separation of the two longitudinal loadout trusses SL and PL (as shown in Figure 5) is set at 36 m to provide enough sideway clearance from the edge of the column legs.

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fabrication and installation methods against other alternative solutions to come up with the least cost. In this study, we are dealing with a skid-over mating method inside a dry dock. Jurong Shipyard wants to fabricate an upper hull of a semi-submersible platform onshore and then skid it out to mate with two prepositioned pontoons inside the dry dock. Their objective is to reduce fabrication schedule. In 1999, Hyundai Heavy Industries used a similar concept to fabricate the 25,500 tons semi-submersible drilling rig, the RBS-8M, where the topside deck weight is 11,000 tons. They rst fabricated the topside deck on the ground, and then used strand jacks to lift the deck 38 m above ground (Cho et al. 2001). The pontoons being fabricated on-site and located on either side of the deck will then be pushed into position for nal mating. Their cost saving was derived from on-the-ground fabrication and installation since it eliminated the need of the dry dock. But, they still had to loadout the assembled structure onto a submersible cargo barge and put it into the water by submerging the cargo vessel. This operation can be very expensive. This study documents how the Loadout Skid Frame was conceived and designed. The Jurong Shipyard engineers did all the loadout planning and job execution. 2. Design criteria and constraints The design of the Loadout Skid Frame has to meet the following fabrication and mating requirements: (1) The planned loadout sequence is to rst fabricate the Upper Hull Deck near the dry dock-head (see Figure 1). The Upper Hull Deck is skidded into the dry dock as shown in Figures 2 and 3. The pontoons are deballasted to mate with the Upper Hull Deck. The assembly is oated out of the dry dock. (2) During loadout, BOS (bottom of steel) of the Upper Hull Deck is set at elevation () 20,100 mm to provide 500 mm clearance between top of the supporting column of the

Figure 2.

Upper Hull at halfway position.

Figure 3.

Upper Hull at nal position.

Figure 1.

Upper Hull at starting position before loadout.

Figure 4.

Cross section view of pontoons inside dry-dock.

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Figure 5.

Upper Hull blocks loading diagram.

(4) The existing service tunnel next to the dockhead is to be protected during loadout. This means that the skid beams have to bridge across the tunnel. (5) The reinforcement inside the dry dock is avoided such that other yard activities can continue during fabrication of the semisubmersibles. (6) Provide access driveways underneath the skid trusses (SL and PL) during fabrication. This is to enable construction equipment to move in and out of the center area of the Upper Hull structure during fabrication. (7) Provide additional supports for the Upper Hull Deck on the cantilever sides. This is to suit the planned block fabrication sequence (see Figure 5). All these supports must be removed prior to loadout. (8) Provide a safe working platform for the entire underside of the Upper Hull Deck. This is for the block installation sequence. (9) The Loadout Skid Frame is to be designed for skid-out as well as pullback operations because it will be re-used to loadout two more semi-submersibles in the coming years. (10) Materials will be sourced from Singapore whenever possible to cut down procurement time. This means that some old or dated materials may have to be re-certied due to unavailability of mill certicates.

3. 3.1.

Design considerations Load path

The Upper Hull of the semi-submersible is a square box having a plan dimension of 74.42 m by 74.42 m. In one direction, there are six transverse frames, including the two side shells, TF0, TF2, TF6, TF12, TF16 and TF18. In the other direction, excluding the side shells, there are two longitudinal bulkheads, PL7 and SL7 (see Figure 5). The center moonpool is bounded by TF6, TF12, PL7 and SL7. After mating, the Upper Hull will be supported by four columns at the four corners of the semi-submersible platform. The column leg size is 15.86 m by 15.86 m. Since the chosen loadout direction is in line with the longitudinal bulkheads and the Upper Hull is to be fabricated in 12 blocks, it is natural to have six transverse trusses (TFs) and two longitudinal trusses in the proposed skid frame conguration as shown in Figure 6. The basic load path of the structure during construction is to take the loads from the TFs to the two longitudinal skid trusses, which are supported by a total of 12 skid shoes, 6 per truss. The loadout skid shoes are located at the 12 intersection points between the 6 TFs and the 2 longitudinal trusses (PL and SL). The skid shoes are shown in Figures 11 and 12. This load path is correct during block assembly. This is because during fabrication, each block will be fabricated at dierent times according to the project schedule and when it is lifted into position on top of the skid frame, it is acting like a weight without overall

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L.Y. Cheung and K.G. Foong from the skid frame need to be provided. These out rigging trusses and towers will be removed before loadout and the load path will be altered again. For the fabrication condition, the structure has to be checked for various block installation sequences for all three semi-submersibles, as they may not have identical weight distribution. However, in the present design, it is assumed that all three semi-submersibles have the same dimensions and framing spacing, otherwise, the skid frame may have to be modied to suit a new layout. 3.2. Selection of structural conguration and connection details Once the load paths are selected and understood, it is straightforward to design the skid frame. To provide maximum stability during loadout and bigger moment arm to resist side load, which is caused by the wind in the transverse direction, the two vertical longitudinal trusses (SL and PL) are spaced at 36 m apart, the maximum spacing allowed, and the loads will go vertically down to the loadout skid shoes. If the two longitudinal trusses were slanted to reduce the 36 m span, the horizontal component of the Upper Hull Deck load at each column base would require a very large member to carry this horizontal force and the resulting connecting details would be very complicated and expensive to fabricate. Direct simple load paths will always cost less. The selected structural conguration is shown on Figures 610. It represents a simple direct load-transfer design. Two 3-D views are also provided in Figures 11 and 12. For access requirement, the depth of all the TFs should not be more than 7.5 m. This is to allow workers to move freely underneath the entire Upper Hull Deck without stepping over too many beams

structural stiness of the Upper Hull. It is clear that the weight will be transferred from the TFs to the two outer longitudinal trusses. One should bear in mind that during block assembly, there are 12 additional supporting towers supporting the blocks (Figure 5). However, after all the blocks are welded up, the TFs will become less eective. Since all the transverse frames in the Upper Hull have been designed to span between the two longitudinal frames, PL7 and SL7, most of the deck load will be transferred directly to the two longitudinal frames by virtue of the hull stiness. The true structural behavior of the combined Upper Hull and the Loadout Skid Frame system is however somewhere in between, depending on how the 300 mm by 300 mm wooden blocks are wedged into position (Figure 7), the oset between the skid trusses and the longitudinal bulkheads, the block assembly sequence, the heavy topside equipment loads and equipment installation sequence. One can conclude that there are two possible load paths to transfer the inner loads acting on the TFs to the two longitudinal loadout skid trusses, SL and PL. One is during block assembly and the other is during loadout. Before loadout, all 12 supporting towers will be removed and this change of the boundary conditions will create a dierent load path. For clearance reasons, the longitudinal skid trusses will have to be oset from the two longitudinal bulkheads (SL7 and PL7) by 3.35 m (see Figure 5), and the eect of the resulting eccentric moments on the Upper Hull Deck have to be checked. It is the oset that creates soft intersection points along the skid trusses and makes the load path for loadout dier from the load path for the in-place condition. Since the Upper Hull Deck is fabricated in blocks and then lifted into position for assembly in air, temporary supporting towers and temporary out-rigging trusses

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Figure 6.

Loadout Skid Frame. Top framing plan @ () 13290.

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Figure 7.

Loadout Skid Frame. Top framing plan @ () 15100.

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Figure 8.

Bottom framing plan of Loadout Skid Frame.

during emergency evacuation and to provide free access to construction equipment on the ground (Figure 10). There will be no diagonal bracings obstructing passageways. During the loadout, the skid frame structure will experience dierent foundation stiness. For the onshore portion, many skin friction piles were installed to support the skidway; therefore, support point settlements will be small. When the Upper Hull Deck is being pulled into the dry dock, the same topside load will have to go through another supporting structure inside the dry dock before going down to the dock oor, which is supported by smaller piles. Therefore, settlements inside the dry dock are expected to be

greater. The self-imposed allowable dierential settlement is 20 mm, which is the limiting criterion to keep the Upper Hull and the loadout system within the allowable stresses during the loadout operation. To satisfy this allowable dierential settlement requirement, the proposed skid shoe design should accommodate rotation capabilities and the structure inside the dry dock and the dock oor supporting piles must be sti enough not to have settlements more than 20 mm. This is a dicult design requirement to meet especially when the dock oor is not to be hacked. In addition, the two longitudinal trusses (SL and PL) must be capable of re-distributing the load due to dierential settlement of 20 mm or more. The

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Figure 9.

Longitudinal truss row.

Figure 10.

Transverse truss row.

re-distribution should take place among all the 6 skid shoes within the same skid truss, either SL or PL. In a standard oshore platform design, direct tubeto-tube connections would be the preferred connection details. However, this type of detail will call for opening up work-points to provide a 50 mm gap for welding and it usually leads to the requirement for heavy wall can material with special through thickness properties such as API Spec 2H Supplementary Requirement S4 (American Petroleum Institute 1999). This is to guard against laminar tearing in thick material. This special heavy wall steel will usually take 4 5 months for delivery to Singapore or may be longer since steel mills do not produce through

Figure 11. down).

Isometric view of Loadout Skid Frame (looking

The IES Journal Part A: Civil & Structural Engineering thickness plates on a regular basis and the small quantity ordered must t into their regular rolling schedule. This long delivery will aect Jurong Shipyard fabrication schedule. Therefore, it was decided to go for gusset connection details, which do not require through thickness properties because the load is transferred by shear. However, gusset connections will produce heavier structures. With the view to keep the weight as low as possible, it is necessary to avoid eccentricities in the skid frame structure. Therefore, gusset plates are used extensively to maintain single work-point at all the nodes. Whenever possible, overlaps are avoided for all the incoming braces and adequate welding access provided. In areas where overlapping is necessary, special welding details are required. If the single work-point design approach is not adopted, many of the gusset plate thicknesses would be more than 100 mm thick and welding could be more troublesome (see Figure 13). In normal oshore platform fabrication, if welding were to follow AWS D1.1 standard (American Welding Society 2000), direct tube-to-tube connections would require welders to have more stringent welding qualications. By using gusset details, this type of welder pre-qualication is not needed and the edge preparation between the gusset plate and the incoming slotted tubular is very simple. It should be noted that unless shipyard welders are engaged in jacket fabrication on a continuous basis, they usually do not have approved qualication to weld tubular connections. Therefore, welders would have to be re-qualied if plate gusset connections are not adopted. It is both time-consuming and expensive. Tubular structures require highly trained welders, tters and Non Destructive Testing (NDT) specialists. NDT and weld-repair procedures are much easier for simple butt welds than tubular connection details. It is also easier to handle the pre-heat and post-heat treatments as per AWS code (American Welding Society 2000), if required, and not many new welding procedure qualications would have to be prepared for the job. 3.3. Methods of skidding loadout In a normal loadout operation of oshore structures, the structure is pulled onto a oating barge, which is butting against the bulkhead by anchor lines. Winches on the barge or on land or barge mounted strand jacks can provide the pulling force. However, due to action and reaction, the barge will exert a pushing force to the quay wall of the bulkhead and horizontal frictional force under the skid shoes will also be applied to all the pile heads supporting the skid ways as shown in

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Figure 14. This is the reason why the supporting piles should be designed for axial and lateral loads (Cheung and Gho 2002). In the present loadout system, we do not have a oating system inside the dry dock and tidal variation does not exist. As long as the dierential settlement is kept small, the loadout skid beam can be made continuous (Figure 15). The skid beam itself is in self-equilibrium, so there is no need to design the supporting piles under the skid beams to take the full lateral load. However, the very long skid beam itself must be checked for beam-column interaction. One of

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Figure 12. up).

Isometric view of Loadout Skid Frame (looking

Figure 13.

Typical joint details in loadout skid frame.

Figure 14.

Typical oshore barge loadout.

Figure 15.

Dry dock loadout system.

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L.Y. Cheung and K.G. Foong Cheung and Gho 2002), but they are outside the scope of this study. 4. Structural design

the key indicators for successful loadout is to monitor dierential settlement between the dock head and vertical deection inside the dry dock. This means that the structure inside the dry dock must be carefully designed to ensure the settlement limitation is met. The other design objective is to spread the topside load equally to all the piles inside the dry dock so that they will not be overstressed. 3.4. Foundation

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During loadout, the soil must be able to support the highly concentrated traveling loads coming down from the skid shoes. Owing to the height limitation, the 500 mm gap requirement for mating and based on 458 spread, there is no way to spread out the load to a longer distance. This implies that bearing stress on the soil will be so high such that piles will be needed to avoid this type of bearing failure. Therefore, a piled skidway is required for the loadout operation. The pile design was handled by other civil engineering consultants who were engaged by Jurong Shipyard. Because of the dierential settlement of 20 mm, the reaction forces at the dock head can increase greatly during loadout and this has been taken care of by installing a few 1.3 m diameter piles at the dock head and dry dock interface. In other oshore platform fabrication yards, a special load-relief platform is installed to handle this load uctuation. There are other types of bulkhead stability issues associated with loadout of heavy structures (Cheung 1989 and

4.1. Design of skid frame The structure has been designed and code checked using standard oshore software, SACS (EDI 2001). All members and connections were checked against API-RP-2A-WSD (American Petroleum Institute 2000) and AISC (American Institute of Steel Construction 1989) codes for interaction equations and punching shear checks. Welding specications, procedures and qualications are to follow AWS D1.1 (American Welding Society 2000). Basically, the skid frame system including design and fabrication of all items is to follow standard oshore practice. The nite element model is shown in Figure 16. For an oshore design, the number of piles in a platform is usually not more than 20. But in the present problem, there are more than 150 piles. First of all, the Upper Hull Deck is sitting on many 300 mm by 300 mm timber blocks placed on top of the skid frame as shown in Figure 7. To simulate this condition, we used gap spring elements, which can take compression but no tension. This is the rst nonlinearity of the analysis. Once the loads have been transferred down to the skid beams, nonlinear soil and nonlinear structural-pile interaction eect will come in and hence the presence of second nonlinearity. The computer program using special built-in iteration procedure can handle this kind of nonlinear analysis.

Figure 16.

Complete computer model for Upper Hull, Loadout Skid Frame and Support structure inside the dry dock.

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Figure 17.

Skid shoe and rocking details.

Figure 18.

Skid shoe link-bar details.

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L.Y. Cheung and K.G. Foong under compression load or by gusset plates if under tension forces. In certain areas of the TFs (TF6 and TF12) where tubular member sizes available in the Singapore market at the time of fabrication, were not big enough to carry the load, shear plates were used instead. Since one of the design constraints is to use whatever materials can be obtained in the Singapore market to cut short the procurement period, some of the dated materials have to be down-graded to account for corrosion and others were tested locally to ensure the required minimum yield stress is met. In fact, the whole design has been modied many times to cater for what can be purchased in the local market and not based on what is needed in the design. In certain areas, the stress ratios are close to unity and in other areas the stress ratios are relatively low. This is a common practice in the oshore industry. Lateral restraints are provided to take care of the design wind load due to 31.3 m/sec (70 mph) wind. However, these restraints will not restrict thermo expansion during fabrication under the hot sun. Tubular connection details were either checked by the computer program using punching shear equations

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All diagonal braces attached to the 12 columns, no matter whether they are from the longitudinal trusses and/or the TFs, are connected to the top of the columns for two reasons. One is to make sure load redistribution, if required, can be accomplished much quicker as bracing pattern can greatly aect load transfer (Cheung 1990). If there is a need for load redistribution due to dierential settlement, we want to get the load out of the troubled leg and transfer to other skid shoes as soon as possible; before it reaches the skid shoe below, otherwise the column or the shoe may be over-stressed. The second reason is that the connection between the skid shoe and the column base is already very highly stressed and it is better not to make it more congested than it needs to be. There is simply not enough space to do proper welding and tting up of all the components. Welding access is a major consideration in the connection design. Secondary trusses were designed and installed to transfer all the loads in between the TFs. They are pinended. This is to make sure that no end moments could get into the TFs and the only induced moments are caused by eccentricities of the pin connections. There were also few connections that failed the punching shear checks and were reinforced by grout injection if

Figure 19.

Loadout jacks mounting arrangement.

The IES Journal Part A: Civil & Structural Engineering as per API RP-2A (American Petroleum Institute 2000) or by elastic nite element analysis with the combined stress less than yield stress. In oshore practice, we usually set the limit to 90% of yield stress. In areas that punching shear check has failed and thicker heavy wall can material is not available, grout injection is used to overcome the problem. Other connection details were checked by hand. 4.2. Design of skid shoe

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All the topside loads are transferred to the skid shoes via shear plates located inside the column legs (Figure 17). Each leg has two shear plates, which are butt welded to the inside of the 1,524 mm (60 in.) diameter column. The shear plates will then transfer the load to the shoe by bearing. To allow for misalignment, the half circular bearing plates on both side-webs of the shoe have been oversized to cater for 12 mm installation tolerance. In between the two shear plates, an additional fabricated T-beam was added to the top of the half pipe to provide additional load path to transfer the load to shoe if the need arises. The rotation capability to handle the dierential deection is also provided by two tightly tted half pipes. Traveling speed is assumed to be about 2.54 mm/sec (6 in. per minute). On the basis of past experience in heavy structure loadout from other oshore platform fabrication yards and further conrmed by simple calculation, such speed will not generate signicant inertia forces on the Upper Hull Deck as long as the whole loadout process is carried out very slowly. The Upper Hull is sitting on the skid frame and is not welded down. On the basis of past experience and also conrmed by site measurement, the expected static friction should be less than 7% of the loadout weight and the dynamic friction is much lower. However, the design static friction for the present system is 20% of the total loadout weight. The actual pulling force required to break the static friction will depend on the type of grease used and the levelness of the skid beam. Being a new skid way, the 20% assumption is reasonable. The timber underneath the shoe is the Balau timber with a very high allowable compressive stress parallel to grain. They are vacuum treated with timber preservative to guard against insect, fungal and termite attack. This is to ensure they can be re-used for future loadouts. Since the pulling force is applied only to the front skid shoes, we have to make sure that this load will only be transferred to the rest of the skid shoes without going through the deck. If this is not done, the skid frame will be over-stressed at the front columns and may cause major failure to the upper hull structure. To overcome this diculty, a special gusset

connection is provided as shown in Figure 18. This innovative detail will allow the connection to bend or rotate in one direction without transmitting any pulling load to the deck. A usual padeye and shackle pin detail will not work in this case. Skid shoes are tted with anchor brackets to accommodate the cable jacks as shown in Figures 1921. They are designed for pulling from either direction. The pulling force must be balanced on either side of the skid shoe and the shoe is not designed to twist. In general, if it is a single point pull, the load should be applied at the centerline of the skid shoe. If it is in tandem pull, the force must be applied equally on

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Figure 20.

Skid shoe jacking bracket details, type 1.

Figure 21.

Skid shoe jacking bracket details, type 2.

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L.Y. Cheung and K.G. Foong moment, therefore side restraints must be provided to cut down the slenderness ratio. At the end of the skid beam where the cable jack anchor block is located, a special holding down detail must be provided to keep the skid beam in place. Jurong Shipyard provided this detail using stationary barges. Since pulling is done at two locations using two sets of cable jacks, racking will occur during loadout. The skid frame has been checked for 5% dierential racking forces, but it is still necessary to minimize the jerking forces due to unequal pull. This is very much an operational problem that required very close cooperation from the loadout crew.

both sides of the shoe. In the present design, the pulling forces come from two independent sources and one would expect certain amount of jerking motion to happen. 4.3. Design of skid beam

One of the most critical areas is to bridge across the tunnel near the dock head. The designed span is 7.2 m as shown in Figures 22 and 23. During pulling, the skid beam is in self-equilibrium and is subject to very large axial load and bending

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Figure 22.

Skid beam arrangement.

Figure 23.

Skid beam cross section.

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The advantage of this fabrication method using Loadout Skid Frame is that during mating, every step can be carefully controlled in a stable environment inside the dry dock. In other fabrication methods such as the one used by Hyundai in 1999, they also enjoyed the same advantage but the total cost for lifting the deck for mating, skidding the two pontoons into position as well as the nal loadout and tiedown operation using a submersible material barge would probably cost more than the Jurong method. It is extremely dicult to nd a submersible barge in this region capable of carrying 25,000 tons concentrated topside load and the cost could be prohibitive to bring in a big barge from elsewhere. Therefore, the present skid/mate fabrication method is not very expensive considering the productivity gained and the extra cost can be spread over three projects. Jurong Shipyard engineers have since successfully loaded out and mated Upper Hull Decks with the Lower Hull Pontoons on two occasions. One was on June 18, 2003 and the latest one was on May 19, 2004. The success of this fabrication method by JSL clearly demonstrated their ability and the usefulness of innovative approach in fabrication and also showed the importance of the concept of Design Economics in Engineering, which emphasizes the need to come up with designs to suit fabrication and installation to generate more prots (Cheung 1990). This is much cheaper than heavy investment in new equipment to improve productivity. Both investment and innovation are essential, but from the Singapore perspective, innovation is much more important in view of the high labor cost in Singapore. Acknowledgements
The authors wish to express their thanks to the following persons for their cooperation: Mr. Seow Tan Hong, Mr. Goh King Kwee and Dr. Zhong Kui (from Jurong Shipyard Private Limited), Associate Professor Choo Yoo Sang and Professor N E Shanmugam (from the National University of Singapore), Assistant Professor Gho Wie Min (from Nanyang Technological University) and Mr. Yeo Ah Tee and Mr. Ng Seng Chow (from Marine Engineering Services Pte Ltd).

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