Prescreening of Environmental Conditions for Prediction of Severe Operation Condition of Offshore Structures

Offshore structures might encounter several environmental and operating conditions during their lifetime of several decades. In order to predict the dynamic behavior of offshore structures, several simulation cases should be considered to deal with all the combinations of ocean environments and operating conditions. Because a sophisticated time-domain coupled dynamic analysis requires an extremely large amount of computational time to handle all the possible cases, an efficient preliminary process to prescreen the probability of severe environmental conditions can be helpful in downsizing the number of simulation cases and computational effort. In this study, a prescreening procedure to reduce the number of environmental conditions for dynamic analyses of offshore structures is proposed. For the efficiency of the procedure, frequency-domain theories were adopted to estimate the platform offset, using quasi-static analyses in line tension prediction. The results were validated by comparing with those of dynamic analysis coupled between platform and mooring lines, and reasonable agreement was observed. In addition, the characteristics of environmental conditions classified to be severe to the system were investigated through the application of the developed prescreening scheme to several actual environmental conditions.