A New Method for System Fatigue Reliability Analysis of Offshore Steel Jacket

Abstract

Fatigue Failure is a common failure mode for offshore steel jacket and the system fatigue reliability analysis for this type of structure has been developed greatly in recent year. Nevertheless none of those methods gives satisfactory results and there are some problems such as long calculating time, low accuracy, etc. To deal with these problems, a Synthesis Searching Method (SSM) and corresponding program for the system fatigue reliability analysis of structure system is proposed in this paper which can identify the dominant fatigue failure paths of the structures more efficiently and much faster. The analytical probability of system failure through these paths has been evaluated. A numerical example is given to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method. It is demonstrated that this method has great advantage in analyzing the fatigue reliability of large and complex offshore steel jackets.