Seismic Collapse Performance of Jacket Offshore Platforms with Time-Variant Zonal Corrosion Model

Abstract

ABSTRACT Corrosion of offshore platforms is inevitable. In an ocean corrosion environment, the strength of a platform is weakened greatly. When simultaneously subjected to earthquakes or other extreme loads, the ultimate bearing capacity of the corroded platform is dramatically reduced, resulting in compounded damage from both corrosion and earthquake. Thus, the influence of corrosion cannot be neglected in the seismic performance investigation of platforms. The commonly used corrosion model in platform design is uniform corrosion, and the corrosion rate rule for any parts or zones in a platform is the same. In real cases, however, there are significant differences between the corrosion characteristics in different parts of a platform. Based on theoretical aspects and measured data, a zonal time-variant corrosion model of a platform is developed for a seismic collapse performance investigation. The pushover and incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) methods are adopted here to calculate the collapse margin ratio (CMR), there serve strength ratio (RSR) and ductility coefficient (μ) that are frequently used for the safety reserve evaluation of a platform. The failure reason and collapse probability of platforms considering different service periods are compared. The most prominent feature of the proposed time-variant zonal corrosion model is to capture potential switch of weak location and resulting failure path of corroded jacket offshore platforms although the proposed model needs further calibration by more reliable in-field measured data. As expected, corrosion can definitely cause a reduction in earthquake resistance of a jacket offshore platform, as well as ultimate deformability. The coupled effect between the time-variant vibration properties of the platform and the spectral characteristics of selected motions, the collapse-level spectral acceleration (SA) does not always decrease with increasing corrosion degree. The curves corresponding to normalized CMR and RSR agree very well with each other in the early corrosion development stage and service period beyond 30 years. Some distinct differences can be found during the two stages, with the greatest difference up to 10% for the example platform.