In offshore oil production activities, risers are employed to connect the wellheads at the sea-bottom to a floating platform at the sea surface. The design of risers is a very important issue for the petroleum industry; many aspects are involved in the design of such structures, related to safety and cost savings, thus requiring the use of optimization tools.In this context, this work presents studies on the application of the Particle Swarm Optimization method (PSO) to the design of steel catenary risers in a lazy-wave configuration. The PSO method has shown good efficiency for some applications, but its performance is dependent on the values selected for the parameters of the algorithm. Therefore, this work describes some variants of the method, and presents results of several experiments performed to analyze the behavior of its parameters, trying to improve the performance of the method and tailor it for the application to the design of riser systems.The resulting method and its best set of parameters can then be taken as the default values in an implementation of the PSO method in the in-house OtimRiser computational tool, oriented to the design of risers, and also incorporating other optimization methods based on evolutionary concepts. 216 A.A. de Pina et al.

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This paper describes the application of solid finite element models in the analysis of five tubular specimens containing interacting corrosion defects. Each of these specimens has been submitted to hydrotest up to failure as part of a previous research project. The specimens were cut from longitudinal welded tubes made of API 5L X80 steel with a nominal outside diameter of 457.2 mm (18 in) and a nominal wall thickness of 7.93 mm (0.312 in). The analyses accounted for large strains and displacements, stress-stiffening and material nonlinearity. The failure pressures predicted by the solid finite element models are compared with the failure pressures of these specimens measured in the laboratory burst tests carried out previously. Also the failure behavior of each specimen is described and illustrated by contour plots of stresses.

The objective of this paper is to study different analysis methodologies for the design of floating production systems. The main issues are the use of uncoupled and coupled analysis methods, and the integration in the analysis and design of the mooring system and the risers. This paper is a companion to another paper also presented in the OMAE2002 Conference [1] The present paper begins describing a “basic” classic, uncoupled methodology, and proceeds with comments on some refinements in the representation of the behavior of the lines in the motion analysis of the vessel. Comments regarding the introduction of some level of integration between mooring line and riser behavior are also presented. These issues are illustrated with studies applying some of the considered design methodologies to the P-18 semi-submersible platform in Campos basin. The companion paper [1] proceeds describing a fully coupled methodology, and some hybrid methodologies that combine coupled and uncoupled analysis tools, and illustrates their application to a DICAS system for deepwater applications in Campos basin.

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SUMMARYThis work presents the implementation of optimized numerical tools for the coupled analysis of floating platforms for offshore oil exploitation. The focus is on time-domain, nonlinear dynamic analysis, considering the coupling between the hydrodynamic behaviour of the hull and the structural behaviour of the mooring lines and risers modelled by finite elements (FEs). Some aspects of the formulation and solution of the large-amplitude equations of motion of the hull of the platform are presented, including a brief description of the hydrodynamic models and calculation of the environmental forces. The main aspects of the formulation for the spatial and time discretization of the structural model for the lines are also discussed. Since coupled analyses may require excessive computational costs, the objective of this work is to present the implementation and application of domain decomposition methods, adapted and specialized for the problem at hand, in order to optimize the efficiency of the computational tool. Two groups of domain decomposition methods are considered: the first is a subcycling technique that takes into account the natural partition that exists between the hull and the lines; the second considers the internal decomposition of the mesh of FEs to represent the mooring lines and risers. The methods are devised having in mind their implementation in computers with parallel architecture. Results of a numerical application are presented in order to assess the performance of the methods.