Analysis of fire-induced progressive collapse for topside structures of a VLCC-class ship-shaped offshore installation

Abstract

This study extends the authors’ previous numerical and experimental studies simulating the progressive collapse of steel stiffened-plate structures in fire events (Paik JK, Ryu MG, He KH, Lee DH, Lee SY, Park DK, Thomas G. 2021a. Full-scale fire testing to collapse of steel stiffened plate structures under lateral patch loading (part 1)–without passive fire protection. Ships Offsh Struct. 16(3):227–242; Paik JK, Ryu MG, He KH, Lee DH, Lee SY, Park DK, Thomas G. 2021b. Full-scale fire testing to collapse of steel stiffened plate structures under lateral patch loading (part 2)–with passive fire protection. Ships Offsh Struct. 16(3):243–254; Ryu MG, He KH, Lee DH, Park SI, Thomas G, Paik JK. 2021. Finite element modeling for the progressive collapse analysis of steel stiffened-plate structures in fires. Thin-Walled Struct. 159:107262). Specifically, this study demonstrates that the computational models developed in the earlier studies can be applied to the analysis of the heat transfer and fire-induced progressive collapse behaviour of the topside structures of a ship-shaped offshore installation. To this end, a hypothetical VLCC-class floating, production, storage and offloading (FPSO) unit hull structure is considered, and transient thermal elastic-plastic large-deformation finite element models are used. The novelty of this study and its contribution to industry are the development of a practical procedure to ensure the fire safety of large-scale steel-plated structures with complex geometries.