On the selection of boundary conditions for top tensioned risers facing wave induced vibrations

Abstract

The severe ocean environment is obviously the source of many uncertain random loads on offshore structures. This harsh environment when acting on the slender top tensioned risers with high aspect ratio (L/D) causes multimodal vibration leading to fatigue failure. Thus, a reliable stress analysis procedure should be applied in the assessment of their long-term behaviors. This research is a study on the effect of boundary conditions on the total and local response of offshore risers due to loads in different sea states. A FEM code is developed for discretization of riser’s structural model and was run for the riser of Amirkabir semisubmersible vessel for 87 sea states in the Caspian Sea and four boundary conditions. The results show that the most severe stresses in the riser don’t happen essentially in the harshest environment. The comparison of boundary conditions shows that clamped-clamped boundaries lead to lowest stress values while the riser experiences a wider band of stress in the pinned-pinned boundary type. While the riser top end boundary condition highly influences the displacements and stresses even in the lower part of riser.