Model test philosophy for FPSO’s in deep brazilian waters

Abstract

Recent discoveries in the deep waters of the Santos Basin Offshore Brazil are paving the way for field developments based on spread or turret moored FPSO’s. For decades, model testing of moored floating structures has been a corner stone during project execution. There were mainly two reasons 1) to obtain design loads to feed into the structural design and 2) to verify with site specific meteocean conditions that no unforeseen phenomena were taking place. The advent during the last two decades of increasingly efficient analysis tools and computer hardware has made the first reason for performing model tests less pressing. There remain, however, a caveat that analyses results could be proven to be in good agreement with experiments. Invitations To Tender (ITT) received by SBM in recent years for FPSO’s to be deployed in deep water Offshore Brazil have systematically called for model tests and for calibration of the numerical analysis tools used for design against project specific experimental results. The paper will present SBM thoughts on optimization of the model test Scope of Work in the larger context of the FPSO engineering and design phase. An example from a recently executed FPSO project offshore Brazil will be selected for illustration.