Vulcan on course

Vulcan SFM, a subsidiary company of Sheffield Forgemasters, says it has secured 40 per cent of its predicted annual contracts in the first month of its financial year.

The company, which provides design, engineering production solutions and project management services, won £4m worth of contracts in July out of an anticipated £10m for the whole 12 months to June 2008.

Ian Gerard, Managing Director of Vulcan, said: ‘This is the start of Vulcan SFM’s second financial year and we anticipate winning approximately £10m of contracts over the coming year.

‘Vulcan is currently handling £7.5m of live contracts to design and supply components for oil platforms and heavy lifting vessels in the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. This includes three contracts taken in July.’

The team at Vulcan is working on highly stressed components within floating oil production platforms and their mooring systems and components for a heavy lift vessel used for the installation and decommissioning of offshore structures.

Ian Gerard said: ‘The processes we are using for all of Vulcan’s projects are highly specialised. We use Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to optimise the strength and integrity of our cast components, making them highly stress tolerant and we create very specific material for use in critical castings.

‘Components we are manufacturing for a heavy-lift vessel are created using a very high strength steel with a yield strength of 600 Newtons per millimetre sq.

Earlier in 2007, Vulcan handled a £700,000 project management contract to supply offshore oil-processing specialist Bluewater with nine mooring-system components for the Aoka Mizu, a 100,000 tonne Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) oil-processing vessel which will operate in the North Sea.

Vulcan has also project managed the manufacture of small explosion pressure vessels for the Atomic Weapons Establishment.