This paper presents the damage assessment of a free-fall dropped object on the seabed. The damage to a dropped object totally depends on the relationship between the impact energy and the soil strength at the mudline. In this study, unexpected dropping scenarios were first assumed by varying the relevant range of the impact velocity, structure geometry at the moment of impact, and soil strength profile along the penetration depth. Theoretical damage assessments were then undertaken for a free-fall dropping event with a fixed final embedment depth for the structure. This paper also describes the results of a three-dimensional large deformation finite element analysis undertaken for the purpose of validation. The analyses were carried out using the coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian approach, modifying the simple elastic-perfectly plastic Tresca soil model. The validation exercises for each dropping scenario showed good agreement, and the present numerical approach was capable of predicting the behavior of a free-fall dropped object.

Membrane type Mark III cargo containment system (CCS) is considered in this study to investigate its strength capability under applied loads due to liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargo. A rectangular plated structure supported by inner hull structure is exemplified from Mark III CCS according to classification society's guidance and it is assumed as multi-layered structure by stacking plywood, triplex, reinforced polyurethane (PU) foam and series of mastic upon inner hull structure. Commercially available general purpose finite element analysis package is used to have reliable FE models of Mark III CCS plate. The FE models and anisotropic failure criteria such as maximum stress, Hoffman, Hill, Tsai-Wu and Hashin taking into account the direction dependent material properties of Mark III CCS plate components and their material properties considering a wide variation of temperature due to the nature of LNG together form the strength analysis procedure of Mark III CCS plate. Strength capability of Mark III CCS plate is understood by its initial failure and post-initial failure states. Results are represented in terms of failure loads and locations when initial failure and post-initial failures are occurred respectively. From the results the basic design information of Mark III CCS plate is given.

The present work was an attempt to investigate the applicability of truncated mooring systems to KRISO's deep ocean engineering basin (DOEB) with ratios of 1:100, 1:60, and 1:50. The depth of the DOEB is 15 m. Therefore, the corresponding truncated depths for this study were equal to 1500 m, 900 m, and 750 m. The investigation focused on both the static and dynamic characteristics of the mooring system. It was shown, in a static pull-out test, that the restoring force of a FPSO vessel could be modified to a good level of agreement for all three truncation cases. However, when the radius of the mooring site was reduced according to the truncation factor, the surge motion response during a free-decay test showed a significant difference from the full-depth model. However, the reduction of this discrepancy was achieved by increasing the radius up to its maximum possible value while considering the size of the DOEB. Especially, in terms of the time period, the difference was reduced from 24.0 to 5.3 s for a truncation ratio of 1:100, 54.1 to 8.6 s for a truncation ratio of 1:60, and 31.7 to 3.9 s for a truncation ratio of 1:50. As a result, the study verified the applicability of the truncated mooring system to the DOEB, and therefore it could represent the full-depth mooring system relatively well in terms of the static and dynamic conditions.

In this study, a spectral fatigue analysis was performed for the topside structure of an offshore floating vessel. The topside structure was idealized using beam elements in the SACS program. The fatigue analysis was carried out considering the wave and wind loads separately. For the wave-induced fatigue damage calculation, motion RAOs calculated from a direct wave load analysis and regular waves with different periods and unit wave heights were utilized. Then, the member end force transfer functions were generated covering all the loading conditions. Stress response transfer functions at each joint were produced using the specified SCFs and member end force transfer functions. fatigue damages were calculated using the obtained stress ranges, S-N curve, wave spectrum, heading probability of each loading condition, and their corresponding occurrences in the wave scatter diagrams. For the wind induced fatigue damage calculation, a dynamic wind spectral fatigue analysis was performed. First, a dynamic natural frequency analysis was performed to generate the structural dynamic characteristics, including the eigenvalues (natural frequencies), eigenvectors (mode shapes), and mass matrix. To adequately represent the dynamic characteristic of the structure, the number of modes was appropriately determined in the lateral direction. Second, a wind spectral fatigue analysis was performed using the mode shapes and mass data obtained from the previous results. In this analysis, the Weibull distribution of the wind speed occurrence, occurrence probability in each direction, damping coefficient, S-N curves, and SCF of each joint were defined and used. In particular, the wind fatigue damages were calculated under the assumption that the stress ranges followed a Rayleigh distribution. The total fatigue damages were calculated from the combination with wind and wave fatigue damages according to the DNV rule.

Offshore structures might encounter several environmental and operating conditions during their lifetime of several decades. In order to predict the dynamic behavior of offshore structures, several simulation cases should be considered to deal with all the combinations of ocean environments and operating conditions. Because a sophisticated time-domain coupled dynamic analysis requires an extremely large amount of computational time to handle all the possible cases, an efficient preliminary process to prescreen the probability of severe environmental conditions can be helpful in downsizing the number of simulation cases and computational effort. In this study, a prescreening procedure to reduce the number of environmental conditions for dynamic analyses of offshore structures is proposed. For the efficiency of the procedure, frequency-domain theories were adopted to estimate the platform offset, using quasi-static analyses in line tension prediction. The results were validated by comparing with those of dynamic analysis coupled between platform and mooring lines, and reasonable agreement was observed. In addition, the characteristics of environmental conditions classified to be severe to the system were investigated through the application of the developed prescreening scheme to several actual environmental conditions.