TESTING

Matrix’s quality and operational reliability is supported by our Subsea Test Facility located at the company’s head office in Western Australia, home to the largest composite syntactic manufacturing plant in the world.

Boasting the Southern Hemisphere’s largest commercially available hyperbaric chamber, the facility allows for the testing of a wide range of products from large energy exploration support components, to items from the defence forces and small subsea electrical connectors.

Matrix’s standard tests include:

• Uplift determination
• Water ingress
• Instrumented buoyancy loss
• Hyperbaric compression and creep
• Hyperbaric collapse
• Bulk modulus
• Buckle arrestment performance
• Subsea controls testing
• Valve testing
• Variable temperature testing

The facilities are supported by a 40-tonne crane that also services 300 m2 of working space with heavy vehicle access.

Consequently large structures can be easily carried directly to the workspace, unloaded, instrumented and loaded for testing in the same undercover area. The Matrix facility is licensed to carry out hyperbaric testing up to 5,200 metres sea water.

The chambers have been designed with spare penetrations to facilitate functional testing of client-supplied equipment, such as cameras in chambers S2, S3, S4 and S5, during the pressure test. All chambers are orientated vertically to facilitate loading and unloading via our 40-tonne crane, with larger chambers mounted underground for safety and environment stability.

• Product weight in water and air
• ROV submersion and functionality
• Submersion and gas leakage
• Underwater NDT inspection
• Flotation
• Riser testing
• Abandonment and cutting tool trials

• Axial and lateral slip loads
• Static loading and 3-point bend
• Compression, shear and tensile testing
• Dropped weight impact testing
• Lifting point/insert load testing
• Paint adhesion testing
• Function and fit-up.

At Matrix, we invest heavily in research and development (R&D) to continually advance our offerings and embrace new opportunities. Many of our products are registered under international patents to protect intellectual property and demonstrate our culture of innovation.

Matrix’s head office boasts a large R&D facility run by scientists and material engineers from a broad spectrum of high performing industry disciplines. A range of on-site testing facilities allows raw materials or finished products to be tested to relevant internal, client and international standards before release.

• Universal testing machines – for compression and tensile properties
• Differential scanning calorimeters (DSC) – to determine reaction energies and glass transition temperatures of polymers
• Thermo gravimetric analysis (TGA) – for determining decomposition temperatures and inorganic (fibre) content of composite plastics
• Pycnometer – for determination of true density of solids (macrospheres)
• Thermostatic water baths – for determination of long-term behaviours of polymer materials (creep, seawater resistance).

• Matrix Subsea Test Facility Brochure