Fit-for-Service Assessment of Deepwater In-Service Low Toughness Mooring Shackles

摘要

Due to a recent mooring shackle failure within the offshore industry, focus has been directed toward existing inservice facilities that have similar manufactured shackles installed in the mooring systems. An in-service deep water facility was identified as having similar mooring components by the same manufacturer that failed in-service. A subsequent assessment of the material properties was undertaken on readily available spare shackles that identified Charpy impact toughness values below the original material specification. Consequently, a fitness-for-service assessment was carried out that included the assessment of the shackle fracture toughness, a finite element analysis of the shackle and associated mooring components, and a deterministic analysis procedure that assessed the structural capacity of the shackle by considering the response of the shackle to the presence of a crack or flaw located at a shackle stress hot spot coupled with a significant return period event. Finally, full-scale structural testing of spare shackles was performed to enable verification of actual shackle load capacity with a flaw located at the shackle stress hot spot. The focus of this paper is on presenting an overview of the fit-for-service methodology and the results of the structural integrity assessment. While a full quantitative risk assessment of the effect of a low fracture toughness shackle in the mooring system would have been ideal, due to the level of data available and the timeframe required for a probabilistic assessment, it was deemed appropriate to undertake a deterministic assessment of the mooring shackles under realistic scenarios representative of service and severe loads that may accompany the service. The results of the deterministic assessment on an actual in-service deepwater floating facility will be presented. The fit-for-service methodology presented in this paper provides a robust method to assess in-service floating facilities that have been identified or suspected of having below-specification mooring components. It has successfully been applied to a number of Chevron in-service floating facilities in different geographical locations.