Comparison of Global Riser Analysis to Full Scale Measurements on the NCS

Fatigue of subsea wellhead systems due to wave-induced loads from riser and rig motions has been subjected to increased attention in recent years. It is expected that calculated riser loads are conservative, as both input parameters and methodology are associated with some uncertainty. However, it is difficult to quantify the degree of conservatism in analytical results unless reference to measurements can be made.Statoil has conducted drilling riser load instrumentation campaigns in several locations around the world over the last few years in order to gather high quality data for accurate assessment of the fatigue loads imposed on the subsea wellheads (see e.g. ref. /1/, /2/, /3/, and /17/). Four (4) of these measurements campaigns have been studied in more detail, with the intention to quantify the degree of conservatism to be expected from drilling riser analysis. Three (3) of these cases have direct bending moment measurements from strain sensors at the BOP connector elevation, giving high confidence in the results. For one (1) of the cases, the bending moments at the WH have been established by use of indirect methods (ref. /2/). The campaigns have been anonymized; They are from the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS), with water depths ranging from 110 to 400m. This paper presents the findings from our comparison of measurements and analytically derived drilling riser loads from these 4 campaigns. The analysis models have not been “tuned” to match the measurements. The goal is rather to get a measure of how well riser analyses are able to predict the real world.The conclusion in this paper is that the global drilling riser analyses accurately predict the cyclic loads on the subsea wellheads, provided that the input data are known with high degree of detail, including e.g. riser tension setting; drill pipe tension variation over time; and hydrodynamic loads. We found that scatter in the results is due to the uncertainty inherent to several of the input parameters.It is also shown that the accumulated fatigue damage from a full drilling campaign, can be established with sufficient degree of accuracy with somewhat lower requirement to the level of detail of the input, like e.g. using unidirectional waves instead of short crested waves. Directionality and spreading of the wave field can be handled by use of factors on the damage rate. A directionality factor is proposed, to enable comparison of directionality of the measured response to the predictions from global analysis.Copyright © 2017 by ASME