Steep breaking waves can result in high impact loads on offshore structures, and several model test campaigns have been conducted to assess the effect of horizontal wave slamming. High loads have been measured, and they can be challenging to withstand without significant deformation. For wave slamming problems it is common to estimate the characteristic slamming load and assume that this will give an equivalent characteristic response. One challenge related to the slamming load is that it has a large variability in load level, the duration of the load and the shape of the overall load pulse. This variability can have a large impact on the estimated response to the characteristic load, causing a similar or larger variability in response. Due to the sensitivity to the structural response, it may be difficult to interpret large amounts of such data to arrive at a relevant design load without making overly conservative assumptions. This paper investigates the sensitivity of the structural response to assumptions made in the material modelling and how the short term variability is affected if we instead of load use response indicators such as plastic strain and max deformation to arrive at a characteristic load. For this purpose, a simplified dynamic response model is created, and the recorded wave impact events can then be evaluated based on the predicted structural response from the simplified model. It was found that the structural response is sensitive to the structural configuration. The assumed material behavior and hydro-elastoplastic effects were identified to greatly affect the structural response. A reasonable approach to arrive at the q-annual response seems to be to first estimate the q-annual extreme slamming load, and then run the structural analysis on several of the measured slamming time series with the estimated q-annual extreme pressure.
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