Connections Checks of Pipe-Laying Barge Stinger System under Complex Loading Conditions

Abstract

Fixed stinger system hanging in the stern to implement pipeline S-lay mainly includes an A-frame, a stinger hitch section, a stinger tail section, a knee-brace and a knee-brace hitch. Expect the functional loads the stinger system may suffer environmental loads in construction area and also the inertia loads induced by barge movements. Contrasting to the design of stinger truss, connection mechanism design becomes more complicated for the unknown loads shared during the laying cases or the survival case of the barge. In this paper a set of analytical approach for connection mechanism design are proposed and demonstrated for specific operating conditions. In this approach, structural response analysis were carried out firstly using a beam-element truss model to which pipelay functional loads, environmental loads and inertia loads had been applied and the loads undertook by stinger connections were extracted. Next other connection models constructed by cell grids were enabled to predict the responses of connections under those loads extracted from the analysis results of the first step. The analysis example of this paper confirms that based on this approach more careful strength or fatigue check had been realized for the connections of fixed stinger.