In-place structural strength and fatigue analysis for floating platform topsides

This paper presents some insights on the state-of-the-art practice that has been utilized recently in the in-place structural strength and fatigue analysis for topsides on deepwater floating platforms such as TLPs and Semi-submersibles. Emphases are put on analysis software, geometric and mass modeling, hydrodynamic loading and its mapping, and analysis procedures. In addition, for the in-place analysis using SACS, a visual basic application (VBA) is developed to map AQWA-LINE hydrodynamic loading to the SACS integrated hull/topsides model; for the in-place analysis using SESAM, many computer aided applications are made to aid the post-processing. These applications have been used in structural analyses for a few TLP and Semi-submersible platform topsides, and are briefly introduced in this paper.