VIV simulation of riser-conductor systems including nonlinear soil-structure interactions

Abstract

This paper presents a fully three-dimensional numerical approach for analyzing deepwater drilling riser-conductor system vortex-induced vibrations (VIV) including nonlinear soil-structure interactions (SSI). The drilling riser-conductor system is modeled as a tensioned beam with linearly distributed tension and is solved by a fully implicit discretization scheme. The fluid field around the riser-conductor system is obtained by Finite-Analytic Navier-Stokes (FANS) code, which numerically solves the unsteady Navier-Stokes equations. The SSI is considered by modeling the lateral soil resistance force according to nonlinear p-y curves. Overset grid method is adopted to mesh the fluid domain. A partitioned fluid-structure interaction (FSI) method is achieved by communication between the fluid solver and riser motion solver. A riser-conductor system VIV simulation without SSI is firstly presented and served as a benchmark case for the subsequent simulations. Two SSI models based on a nonlinear p-y curve are then applied to the VIV simulations. Also, the effects of two key soil properties on the VIV simulations of riser-conductor systems are studied.