Evolution of Flexcom Software |
 
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Evolution of Flexcom Software |
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Originally, Flexcom had a sister package called Freecom, which was a frequency domain finite element offshore analysis package. With the advent of Flexcom 7.7, a major milestone was reached – the frequency domain analytical capabilities of Freecom were merged into Flexcom, the net effect being that Freecom ceased to exist as a standalone entity. The decision to merge the two programs was taken for a variety of reasons, including:
•Freecom had two basic modes of operation, the stand-alone mode in which it performed all stages of the analysis (static and dynamic) itself, and the restart mode in which it restarted from a Flexcom static analysis. The latter mode was more powerful, as Freecom on its own was not capable of performing static analysis of a wide range of structures (such as SCRs and flexible risers), and so required Flexcom to evaluate the structure stiffness matrix. So since Freecom relied on Flexcom to a large extent, it was logical to merge the two programs.
•The dependency of Freecom on Flexcom described above also meant that compatibility had to continuously maintained between the two programs. Generally speaking, this meant that every time a new version of Flexcom was released, an updated version of Freecom was also required to maintain compatibility, even if no technical enhancements had been made to Freecom itself. Naturally, this scenario was not ideal, and inefficient in many cases.