Lazy Wave Riser Design in High Current and Mild Sour Environment

Author(s):  
Rupak Ghosh ◽  
Carlo Pellegrini ◽  
Tyler J. Visco

Abstract This paper presents an innovative design of Lazy Wave Steel Catenary Riser (LWSCR) associated with a major deepwater development in a new frontier and in very high current. The conventional LWSCR design with distributed buoyancy is not found acceptable considering fatigue design acceptance criteria in mild sour environment. The major design requirement is to meet acceptable design life of 20-yrs considering significant damage accumulated due to Vortex-induced-vibration (VIV) and motion fatigue. Further, other development basis including flow assurance requirements and reservoir souring are critical requirements for the design of the riser system. The paper presents a very useful insight in how several qualified technologies can be leveraged to result in a workable riser design in a very aggressive execution schedule. The results from the analyses of a production LWSCR are presented in the paper.

Author(s):  
Peimin Cao ◽  
Sherry Xiang ◽  
Luc Chabot ◽  
Paul Fourchy ◽  
Rafik Boubenider

The Thunder Hawk field was developed through a Steel Catenary Riser (SCR) system connected to a DeepDraft Semi® Floating Production Unit (FPU) installed in approximately 6,060-ft. water depth in the central Gulf of Mexico (GoM). This paper presents an integrated riser design experience, focusing on the significant design challenges and solutions. The Thunder Hawk FPU was one of the first deepwater projects to address the enhanced GoM environment criteria. These criteria required the integrated design team to configure a feasible and robust hull, mooring and riser system. Model tests were performed to validate the design and calibrate the analysis model. Other challenges included the SCR fatigue and fracture design, titanium stress joint and receptacle design for the high pressure production risers, flex joint over-rotation design, and porch fatigue design. A significant amount of sensitivity analyses were performed to cover the uncertainty of the various hull, mooring, and riser design parameters that affected the SCR performance. The SBM Atlantia (SBMA) riser team worked closely with the Murphy Integrated Project Team (IPT) to achieve a robust and comprehensive riser design 16 months before the first SCR was installed. The highly integrated engineering approach enabled prompt and full considerations of the system interactions, and provided instant design evaluation throughout the project. The sensitivity analyses established the system design envelopes, and resulted in significant flexibility in offshore installation and operation.


Author(s):  
C. H. Luk ◽  
T. J. Wang

Engineering Criticality Assessment (ECA) is a procedure based on fracture mechanics that may be used to supplement the traditional S-N approach and determine the flaw acceptance and inspection criteria in fatigue and fracture design of risers and flowlines. A number of design codes provide guidance for this procedure, e.g. BS-7910:2005 [1]. However, more investigations and example studies are still needed to address the design implications for riser and flowline applications. This paper provides a review of the existing ECA methodology, presents a fracture mechanics design method for a wide range of riser and flowline fatigue problems, and shows flaw size results from steel catenary riser (SCR) and flowline (FL) examples. The first example is a deepwater SCR subjected to fatigue loads due to vessel motion and riser VIV. The second example is a subsea flowline subjected to thermal fatigue loads. The effects of crack re-characterization and material plasticity on the Level-2 and Level-3 ECA results of the SCR and flowline examples are illustrated.


Author(s):  
Feng Wang ◽  
Roger Burke ◽  
Anil Sablok ◽  
Kristoffer H. Aronsen ◽  
Oddgeir Dalane

Strength performance of a steel catenary riser tied back to a Spar is presented based on long term and short term analysis methodologies. The focus of the study is on response in the riser touch down zone, which is found to be the critical region based on short term analysis results. Short term riser response in design storms is computed based on multiple realizations of computed vessel motions with various return periods. Long term riser response is based on vessel motions for a set of 45,000 sea states, each lasting three hours. The metocean criteria for each sea state is computed based on fifty six years of hindcast wind and wave data. A randomly selected current profile is used in the long term riser analysis for each sea state. Weibull fitting is used to compute the extreme riser response from the response of the 45,000 sea states. Long term analysis results in the touch down zone, including maximum bending moment, minimum effective tension, and maximum utilization using DNV-OS-F201, are compared against those from the short term analysis. The comparison indicates that the short term analysis methodology normally followed in riser design is conservative compared to the more accurate, but computationally more expensive, long term analysis methods. The study also investigates the important role that current plays in the strength performance of the riser in the touch down zone.


Nature ◽  
1950 ◽  
Vol 165 (4193) ◽  
pp. 403-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. M. AZZAM ◽  
J. O'M. BOCKRIS

Author(s):  
Mehrdad Kimiaei

Steel Catenary Risers (SCRs) are one of the main components in development of oil and gas fields in deep waters. Fatigue design of SCRs in touch down zone (TDZ) is one of the main engineering challenges in design of riser systems. Nonlinear riser-soil interaction models have recently been introduced and used widely in advanced structural analysis of SCRs. Due to hysteretic nonlinear behavior of the soil, SCR system will show different structural response under different loading time histories. This paper investigates the effects of nonlinear riser-soil interaction in the TDZ on fatigue performance of an example SCR subjected to randomly generated waves. Sensitivity of fatigue life of the system, location of the critical node and the maximum stress range to different wave realizations and different soil types are discussed in detail.


2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcos Vinicius Rodrigues ◽  
Vigleik L. Hansen ◽  
Rodrigo Almeida Bahiense ◽  
Celso Velasco Raposo

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