On the long-term fatigue analysis of marine structures

Abstract

This paper investigates the performance of several procedures available in literature used to evaluate the multi-dimensional integral associated with long-term fatigue assessment of marine structures. Direct integration methods, Monte Carlo-based approaches and Dimension-Reduction methods are investigated. The focus is on solving the four-dimensional integral for wave-induced fatigue cases when wind-sea and swell waves are simultaneously considered in the analysis. Although the procedures investigated can be used either for time-domain or frequency-domain fatigue approaches, all fatigue analyses performed in this work are restricted to the frequency-domain and are based on idealized stress transfer functions that attempt to mimic the complex behavior of some marine structures. To evaluate the performance of these methodologies, different transfer functions of unimodal and bimodal types are studied. The long-term fatigue damages are calculated using all the investigated methods, and their accuracies and efficiencies are compared. It is found that the efficiency of Monte Carlo Simulation-based methods is problem-dependent and may require many numerical simulations to achieve good accuracy for some cases. Additionally, the Dimension-Reduction methods can lead to highly suitable results with a very low number of integration points and, among all methods investigated, the BDRM (Bivariate Dimension-Reduction Method) stands out due to its excellent performance.