Modeling touchdown point oscillation and its relationship with fatigue response of steel catenary risers

Abstract

The riser-seabed interaction resulting in a trench formed in the touchdown zone (TDZ) of steel catenary risers (SCR) has a significant influence on accumulated fatigue damage. Several studies have used different trench modeling approaches to investigate the trench effect on fatigue. However, contradictory observations have been reported with no coherent agreement on the beneficial or detrimental effect of the trench on fatigue. In this study, the significance of trench geometry in fatigue damage evaluation was investigated. Using analytical and numerical approaches, a meaningful relationship was observed between the trench slope in different zones and the peak fatigue damage. A new set of rules was proposed for the qualitative assessment of the overall trend of trench effect on the variation of fatigue damage. The proposed assessment rules were validated by performing comprehensive numerical fatigue analysis. A comparison with samples of published experimental and numerical studies was also completed. It was observed that depending on the direction of the low-frequency vessel excursions, the peak fatigue damage may increase towards the near offsets and decrease towards the far vessel offset. This implied that the case dependency of the trench effect on fatigue response in different geographical locations with various environmental loads was a potential source for the contradictory results reported in previously published studies.