Abstract
Blast walls are installed on the topside of offshore structures to reduce the damage from fire and explosion accidents. The blast walls on production platforms such as floating production storage, offloading, and floating production units undergo fire and explosion risk analysis, but information about blast walls on the well-test area of drillship topsides is insufficient even though well tests are performed 30 to 45 times per year. Moreover, current industrial practices of design method are used as simplified elastically design approaches. Therefore, this study investigates the strength characteristic of blast wall on drillship based on the blast load profile from fire and explosion risk analysis results, as well as the ability of the current design scantling of the blast wall to endure the blast pressure during the well test. The maximum plastic strain of the FE results occurs at the bottom connection between the vertical girder and the blast wall plate. Based on the results, several alternative design applications are suggested to reduce the fabrication cost of a blast wall such as differences of stiffened plated structure and corrugated panels, possibility of changing material (mild steel), and reduced plate thickness for application in current industrial practices.
Highlights
One of the most important trends in the development of the modern oil and gas industry is reorientation to the development of offshore oil and gas fields
For selection of blast loading shapes, Sohn and Kim [13] provided that the effects of the shape of the load profile on the structural characteristic of blast walls show that the duration and peak pressure are not critical, but impulse is important in the impulsive domain
The current blast wall structure on drillship is designed with the linear beam theory approach, the structure is assumed as a rigid body, and the stresses are concentrated at the bottom end of the vertical supports
Summary
One of the most important trends in the development of the modern oil and gas industry is reorientation to the development of offshore oil and gas fields. Oil-based drilling fluids can be toxic to the marine species, if any incident of oil spills happens, such as the Gulf of Mexico, whereas, considered WBDF with nano-particles are non-toxic [4,5,6] For those reasons, the well-test area on drillship installed blast walls for minimizing and preventing explosion damage surrounding modules. The structural design of the blast wall should consider the type of explosive load to which the structure will be exposed because of the numerous uncertainties inherent in an explosion According to this reason, numerous investigations of blast walls on offshore platforms have been conducted to determine design methods and for structural evaluation though theoretical, numerical, and experimental approaches. A blast wall on a drillship should be re-evaluated with advanced and/or developed methods for proper and accurate design
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