Flexible risers and steel catenary risers often provide unique riser solutions for today’s deepwater field development. Accurate analysis of these slender structures, in which there are high-speed HP/HT internal flow...Flexible risers and steel catenary risers often provide unique riser solutions for today’s deepwater field development. Accurate analysis of these slender structures, in which there are high-speed HP/HT internal flows, is critical to ensure personnel and asset safety. In this study, a special global coordinate-based FEM rod model was adopted to identify and quantify the effects of internal flow and hydrostatic pressure on both flexible and deepwater steel catenary risers, with emphasis on the latter. By incorporating internal flow induced forces into the model, it was found that the internal flow contributes a new term to the effective tension expression. For flexible risers in shallow water, internal flow and hydrostatic pressure made virtually no change to effective tension by merely altering the riser wall tension. In deep water the internal pressure wielded a dominant role in governing the riser effective tension and furthering the static configuration, while the effect of inflow velocity was negligible. With respect to the riser seabed interaction, both the seabed support and friction effect were considered, with the former modeled by a nonlinear quadratic spring, allowing for a consistent derivation of the tangent stiffness matrix. The presented application examples show that the nonlinear quadratic spring is, when using the catenary solution as an initial static profile, an efficient way to model the quasi-Winkler-type elastic seabed foundation in this finite element scheme.展开更多
The most critical issue in the steel catenary riser design is to evaluate the fatigue damage in the touchdown zone accurately. Appropriate modeling of the riser-soil resistance in the touchdown zone can lead to signif...The most critical issue in the steel catenary riser design is to evaluate the fatigue damage in the touchdown zone accurately. Appropriate modeling of the riser-soil resistance in the touchdown zone can lead to significant cost reduction by optimizing design. This paper presents a plasticity model that can be applied to numerically simulate riser-soil interaction and evaluate dynamic responses and the fatigue damage of a steel catenary riser in the touchdown zone. Utilizing the model, numerous riser-soil elements are attached to the steel catenary riser finite elements, in which each simulates local foundation restraint along the riser touchdown zone. The riser-soil interaction plasticity model accounts for the behavior within an allowable combined loading surface. The model will be represented in this paper, allowing simple numerical implementation. More importantly, it can be incorporated within the structural analysis of a steel catenary riser with the finite element method. The applicability of the model is interpreted theoretically and the results are shown through application to an offshore 8.625 steel catenary riser example. The fatigue analysis results of the liner elastic riser-soil model are also shown. According to the comparison results of the two models, the fatigue life analysis results of the plasticity framework are reasonable and the horizontal effects of the riser-soil interaction can be included.展开更多
基金Supported by the National High-tech Research and Development Program of China (863 Program) under Grant No. 2010AA09Z303the Key Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 50739004)the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11002135)
文摘Flexible risers and steel catenary risers often provide unique riser solutions for today’s deepwater field development. Accurate analysis of these slender structures, in which there are high-speed HP/HT internal flows, is critical to ensure personnel and asset safety. In this study, a special global coordinate-based FEM rod model was adopted to identify and quantify the effects of internal flow and hydrostatic pressure on both flexible and deepwater steel catenary risers, with emphasis on the latter. By incorporating internal flow induced forces into the model, it was found that the internal flow contributes a new term to the effective tension expression. For flexible risers in shallow water, internal flow and hydrostatic pressure made virtually no change to effective tension by merely altering the riser wall tension. In deep water the internal pressure wielded a dominant role in governing the riser effective tension and furthering the static configuration, while the effect of inflow velocity was negligible. With respect to the riser seabed interaction, both the seabed support and friction effect were considered, with the former modeled by a nonlinear quadratic spring, allowing for a consistent derivation of the tangent stiffness matrix. The presented application examples show that the nonlinear quadratic spring is, when using the catenary solution as an initial static profile, an efficient way to model the quasi-Winkler-type elastic seabed foundation in this finite element scheme.
文摘The most critical issue in the steel catenary riser design is to evaluate the fatigue damage in the touchdown zone accurately. Appropriate modeling of the riser-soil resistance in the touchdown zone can lead to significant cost reduction by optimizing design. This paper presents a plasticity model that can be applied to numerically simulate riser-soil interaction and evaluate dynamic responses and the fatigue damage of a steel catenary riser in the touchdown zone. Utilizing the model, numerous riser-soil elements are attached to the steel catenary riser finite elements, in which each simulates local foundation restraint along the riser touchdown zone. The riser-soil interaction plasticity model accounts for the behavior within an allowable combined loading surface. The model will be represented in this paper, allowing simple numerical implementation. More importantly, it can be incorporated within the structural analysis of a steel catenary riser with the finite element method. The applicability of the model is interpreted theoretically and the results are shown through application to an offshore 8.625 steel catenary riser example. The fatigue analysis results of the liner elastic riser-soil model are also shown. According to the comparison results of the two models, the fatigue life analysis results of the plasticity framework are reasonable and the horizontal effects of the riser-soil interaction can be included.
