Driven by its purpose of safeguarding life, property and the environment, DNV GL has opened a new, state-of-the-art training centre at its large-scale testing and research facility at Spadeadam in Cumbria, UK. The international oil & gas advisory and classification society is also inviting participation in a new joint industry project (JIP) to improve cost-efficiencies in explosion protection designs for process areas with testing to take place at the site.
More than GBP 3M has been invested in the Spadeadam Testing and Research centre to enhance its offering to perform rarely available trials in a controlled and secure ‘real-life’ environment. The site features most advanced destructive and non-destructive test facilities. The new training and conference facility will enhance experiential learning for the oil and gas, chemical, utilities, and security industries.
Spadeadam will run full-scale experiments, using available test rigs, for a new DNV GL-led JIP, CostFX, to investigate cost-efficient explosion load descriptions for process areas. The results will be used to generate standards and guidelines to allow structural engineers to pre-define design explosion loads for standard installations, mitigating the need for costly, specialist analyses.
