Enhancing Air Gap Design and Assessment in Deepwater Floating System Performance

Abstract

This paper discusses how to enhance air gap design and assessment for the deepwater floating systems. The authors first establish an analytical method to predict air gap considering global upwelling due to wave diffraction, as well as random wave effects. Then the authors apply the analytical method to simulate the air gap of typical deepwater floating systems through uncoupled analysis combining frequency domain and time domain global motion analysis. For comparison, a coupled analysis with hull structure, mooring and riser system is also carried out. The authors then look into model test verification and correlation analysis of air gap prediction, especially how to deal with random motion effects on deriving the extreme values of air gap. Furthermore, the authors illustrate how to improve deepwater floating system performance and cost-effectiveness by utilizing a practical and reliable air gap design approach.The air gap simulation results derived from the proposed analytical procedure correlate well with the wave basin model test results. This analytical procedure has also been applied to deepwater floating system design for field development projects, which can be considered as a practical and reliable air gap design solution for optimizing global configuration to improve deepwater floating system performance and cost effectiveness.