During installation of subsea structures such as mud mats, the tension in crane wires can experience spikes when the structure is near the seabed. It is hypothesized that such spikes may be caused by the structure undergoing resonant oscillations, which in turn may be due to changes in added mass and damping near the seabed. Such motions can cause hardship for operators as they interfere with precise positioning during installation. With increasing exploration and production in deep and remote fields, the size and weight of subsea equipments are continuously increasing. Installation operations such as lifting and lowering, positioning of the object require good knowledge of the hydrodynamic coefficients. Following on ideas used in Norwegian offshore, the mud mat is modeled as a circular disk. Experiments are conducted on an oscillating solid disk of diameter and thickness 200 mm and 2 mm respectively. The heave oscillations are forced by a programmable actuator, at amplitudes varying from 1–56 mm and frequencies from 1.0–1.8 Hz. The elevation ‘h’ of the disk from the mean seabed is varied from 0.2–2 times the disk radius. The forces on the disk are measured using a submersible high-sensitivity load cell. The motions of the disk are restricted to axial (heave) direction, and are measured with a displacement transducer. The measured forces and displacement are analyzed using a Fourier Transform algorithm to separate the added mass and damping effects. The authors have found similar trends in the hydrodynamic behavior of a disk approaching the seabed to what was found when the disk approached the free surface in Wadhwa & Thiagarajan [1]. The added mass and damping coefficients were found to increase with increasing KC, as well as with increasing proximity to the seabed. Another noticeable feature of the experiments was the cavity formation underneath the oscillating structure. The width of the cavity was about 3–4 times the radius of the disk and depth was about one third/fourth of the radius of the disk. The size of the cavity and the increase in hydrodynamic forces near the seabed suggest the importance of knowledge of hydrodynamic behavior near the seabed.
The use of different types of subsea equipment is continuously increasing in offshore field development. Installation operations such as lifting and lowering of these equipments require knowledge of the hydrodynamic coefficients of the object. An accurate prediction of these coefficients on typical subsea structures is a challenging task. The main coefficients in this context relate to added mass, damping and slamming effects. Formulations have been presented by various authors in literature for evaluating these coefficients for simple shapes. Some of them have found widespread application in the industry. The authors have considered a solid circular disk as a base case for initiating study on subsea module hydrodynamics. Experiments were conducted on an oscillating solid disk of diameter 200 mm and thickness 2 mm near the free surface. Forced oscillations were conducted at amplitudes varying from 3mm–36mm and frequencies 0.9–1.5 Hz respectively. The forces on the disk were measured using a submersible high-sensitivity load cell. The motions of the disk were restricted to axial (heave) direction, and were measured with a displacement transducer. The measured forces and displacement were analyzed using a Fast Fourier Transform algorithm to separate the added mass and damping effects. From the rate of change of added mass with depth of submergence, slamming forces were identified. The measured coefficients were compared with similar published data by Vu et al [1] and Tao & Dray [2]. The paper presents various formulations for added mass, damping and slamming obtained from literature and currently in use in the industry. These formulations are compared with measured values of the coefficients and suggestions are made on the importance of these formulations for flat subsea structures.
In the probabilistic analysis of engineering systems, the design point denotes a particular set of input parameters where the system response is most likely to take a given design value. It provides important information on the system behaviour and its sensitivity to input parameters. The design point is determined from the joint probability distribution function (pdf) of input parameters. Mathematically, the problem is equivalent to an isoperimetric problem: find a stationary point of the joint pdf subject to the given value of the system response. The proposed method depends on the response and the joint pdf being parallel at the stationary point. This requires the projection of the pdf gradient to be zero on the hyperplane orthogonal to the response
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