Fighting riser fatigue with less effort

摘要

Computationally efficient approaches to fatigue assessment of deepwater risers now require much less computational effort and disk storage capacity. Certainly, during system design, these advantages are significant because they allow for greater coverage and exploration of the design space. Ships and offshore structures are subjected to fluctuating stresses all year round. If the fluctuating stresses are sufficiently large, small crack-like defects will grow in size and eventually cause the structure to break; this process is referred to as fatigue. Marine risers are long, slender structures and fatigue-sensitive, so it is important to document an acceptable fatigue capacity for the risers lifetime; hence the need for a reliable procedure for fatigue life calculation.