Vulcan’s success is supported by outstanding contract enquiries valued at £43.5m, demonstrating a global demand for the company’s services, which tap into the diverse wealth of expertise carried by parent company Sheffield Forgemasters International Limited (SFIL).

Ian Gerard, managing director of Vulcan, said: “Our contract take-up for July is outstanding. 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 are applying their expertise to 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.

 “The realisation for this company at its inception was that it would exist to challenge design and construction techniques to make highly specific components and to fully manage complex contracts requiring many engineering solutions. The strength of our order book clearly shows that we are reaching those goals.”

In the earlier part of 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.

SFIL specialises in a broad range of heavy forged and cast steel products as well as stocking ingot and bar. SFIL can design, establish material requirements, produce material specifications and manufacture products to the highest quality

SFIL produce some of the largest bespoke engineered products in the world with capacity for castings of up to 350 tonnes and forgings of up to 200 tonnes