Student Offshore Design Competition

A team from the Naval and Ocean Engineering Department at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) has won the first International Student Offshore Design Competition sponsored by the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (SNAME) and the Ocean, Offshore and Arctic Engineering Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) with their entry "Preliminary Design of the 'Maracanã' FPSO Unit." The entry was one of eight projects submitted by students from universities around the world.

"The biggest challenge for us was not a conversion of an existing ship but an FPSO design from the beginning," said João Alberto Rangel de Almeida, Team Leader. "We worked with a software program to extrapolate design dimensions and optimize the weight and cost of the structure." The students used research and data from Petrobras to base their design model on a site- specific structure located offshore Brazil in the Campos Basin. The award winning "Maracanã" FPSO features a symmetrical ship form with 30m depth, 48m width, 270m length and a load capacity of 1.5 million barrels.