Response of FPSO Systems to Squalls

Abstract

Squalls are mesoscale sudden wind-speed increases that can occur worldwide and are a design driver for FPSO systems in areas the other design environmental conditions are relatively benign, e.g. offshore West Africa. Squalls are transient winds which rapidly reach a peak wind speed (up to 50 m/s) and then decay to low speeds in a span of 60 to 90 minutes. As squalls are transient phenomena traditional steady-state analysis techniques cannot be used for the global analysis or the development of the extreme response estimates. This paper focuses on the characterization of the squall environment and the impact of various parameters on the response of FPSOs. The responses of both spread and turret moored FPSOs are presented and the difference in response is discussed. The paper then focuses on a parametric study on a representative single degree of freedom model of a spread-moored FPSO with an emphasis on the estimation of the extreme response and its dependence on sample size.