Disruptive Structural Design Technique for Fixed Jacket-Type Offshore Platforms

Abstract The present work proposes a semi-empirical method to configure, size and carry out the preliminary design of a fixed offshore platform considering only a few basic input parameters when topside details are unavailable. Input parameters include the water depth, maximum wave height, design seismic coefficient, functional type of the offshore platform, a rough estimate of the gross topside weight (other than structure), the number of well conductors and the available information on piles axial capacity. The main objective of the work is to automatically create a design and produce material take-off (MTO) that is sufficient for tender documents. The computer program developed for the above purpose generates a detailed analytical model incorporating available knowledge on equipment layout and structural design. The program creates a design without actually carrying out any structural analysis and generates the MTO based on the model created by the program. The proposed designs are benchmarked against several existing designs. Notwithstanding the fact that a number of different structural designs can exist for the same input data, the estimated MTO's match closely with all existing designs. The most important advantage is the immediate availability of the structural analytical model for subsequent detailed analyses and initiates a 3D model for other engineering disciplines to build up equipment, piping, utilities, etc.