Abstract
As more oil and gas are discovered in deeper water than ever before, the offshore industry has become increasingly interested in the design of advanced offshore production platforms. A new design concept called FLOATING JACKET (FJ) is studied in this thesis. The most unique feature of the new FJ concept is to place much of the needed buoyancy/ballast deep in the ocean water. The deck and production equipment are supported by a jacket structure which is in turn mounted on top of the large buoyancy/ballast tank deeply submerged below the ocean surface. This concept offers many attractive features. Model testing of the FJ was performed in Offshore Technology Research Center (OTRC). The responses of the FJ under regular waves and 100-year storm-n in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM), with or without surface current, have been investigated. responses are obtained and the linear relationships between the responses and between the mooring tension and the responses are identified. The quadratic relationship between the low frequency responses and the input wave elevations are presented by using the bi-coherence spectral analysis. Experimental results in 100-year storm are compared to the analytical calculations both in time and frequent domains. Surface current is included in some of the comparisons. The results are in good agreement, especially for the 100-year storm-n without current. From the experimental studies on the FJ platform, it can be concluded that this new Floating Jacket concept is indeed a feasible and superior platform configuration for deep water production systems.
Xu, Yufeng (1996). Experiment study on FLOATING JACKET: a new concept for deep water platform design. Master's thesis, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from
https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /ETD -TAMU -1996 -THESIS -X8.