An Idealization of Wave Scatter Diagram for Spectral Fatigue Analysis

Abstract

A spectral fatigue analysis method is most popularly applied for the detailed design of FPSOs. As the environmental loads at the installation site are directly calculated in the spectral analysis, this method gives the most reliable results although it needs much time-consuming works to fully reflect the environmental loads. As the technology of wave measurements advances, the measured wave data increase. Also their spectral models are very complicated because these include many wave components such as swells and wind seas. Since much time and effort are needed to treat these enormous and complicated wave data for the spectral fatigue analysis, a rational idealization of wave data is definitely required. In this paper, wave scatter diagram at Offshore Nigeria was reviewed and their idealization method was proposed. The influence level of each sea state of the wave scatter diagram was identified considering the fatigue damage levels estimated from the significant wave heights and dominant fatigue load RAOs. The sea states giving small fatigue damages were lumped symmetrically by merging or disregarding while those giving large fatigue damages were kept as original. For the validation of this method, the comparisons of dominant fatigue loads and representative fatigue damages were presented for the idealized wave scatter diagram and the original one. From these comparison works, it was confirmed that the idealized wave scatter diagram gives reliable results with reduced amount of calculation work.