A Study on the Fatigue Assessment of Offshore Steel Catenary Riser

Declination of production from onshore and shallow water reserves has fostered the deepwater field development. Safe and robust designs of structures and systems for deepwater offshore development are relatively complicated due to the impact of high current and wave. Hence, investigation of the fatigue performance of steel catenary riser (SCR) in associated with vortex-induced vibration (VIV) is relatively important, considering VIV is one of the important factors causing fatigue damage of deepwater SCR. The lack of comprehensive studies of the effect of current profiles to the VIV fatigue damage of SCR prompts the investigation of VIV fatigue performance of SCR in this study. This study aims to propose a new approach that utilises current index concept and Fatigue Damage-Current Index (FD-CI) diagram to establish the relationship between current profiles and VIV short term fatigue damage of SCR for fatigue damage estimation.