Marine Growth Colonization Process in Guinea Gulf: Data Analysis

Abstract

Colonization process of marine growth increasingly arouses the interest of the oil industry because engineering design or reassessment of platforms requires forecasting of biological fouling specific to the area where they are located. Numerous publications related to marine growth on installations of North Sea, Gulf of Mexico, or oil sites in other parts of the world tried to answer the need to supply more quantitative data on biological fouling. Unfortunately, there is a lack of qualitative and quantitative published data in the Gulf of Guinea, where biological fouling has a significant impact on cost of structural inspection and maintenance because of the importance of colonization due to favorable environmental parameters (warmer temperature of seawater, intense action of the waves generating a mixing of the nutritive elements, strong light, etc.). This paper is dedicated to bridge that gap and describe ecosystem dynamics of marine growth in the Gulf of Guinea. We describe patterns of development for dominant types of biofouling in the region. Analyses of evolution and related kinetics parameters are carried out to give main trends of colonization process. Predictive models of marine growth development and their statistical parameters are proposed for reassessment and engineering design.

An underwater lighting and turbidity image repository for analysing the performance of image-based non-destructive techniques

“…For underwater inspections, one such example concerns the tracking of marine growth thickness on offshore structures. Marine growth is undesirable as it increases the hydrodynamic forces acting on the host structure (Boukinda Mbadinga et al, 2007). There are a number of practical image based approaches capable of recovering 3D shape.…”

Model of Bio-Colonisation on Mooring Lines: Updating Strategy Based on a Static Qualifying Sea State for Floating Wind Turbines

“…Equation (1)). In previous works about spatial distribution of bio-colonisation on offshore structures [4,11,12,17,20,24], there is neither clear evidence of a general slope break, which would have justified a bilinear model, nor clear evidence of a slowing down of the rate of decrease, which would have justified an exponential model.…”

“…After reviewing existing data on bio-colonisation of offshore structures, one can cite the very large database made up during the Joint Industry R&D Project "Marine Growth Data Bank" led by Veritec, or the work of Boukinda [12] in the Gulf of Guinea. There are still under construction large database such as "OCEANIC" led by WavEC or "ABIOP" and "ABIOP+" which are France Energies Marines projects.…”

“…In fact, the non-monotony of the temporal evolution of bio-colonisation (cf. [12]) makes its prediction difficult. Phenomena that could be responsible for the non-monotony, are:…”

“…Jusoh and Wolfram [11] showed a clear decrease with depth and Ameryoun [4] (from p. 45) reviewed studies from North Atlantic offshore platforms highlighting an increase with time, limited by natural barriers. Boukinda [12] showed long term evolution with depth for a number of species in the Gulf of Guinea. A model is then worth.…”