It is well known that the riser system represents an important part of a production unit’s total cost. To ensure economic feasibility it is important to find means to reduce this cost to its minimum. In order to achieve cost reduction and other design improvements, optimization algorithms have been used in several areas with great success. This paper presents the application of such an algorithm, known as Genetic Algorithm, to the optimization of a steel riser taking into account material and installation costs. From a given inner diameter and material for both pipe and floater, the optimizer is left free to vary the number of segments as well as the pipe thickness, length and floater diameter for each segment, inside user-defined ranges. Each obtained configuration is tested in a set of load cases with different currents and offsets. Restrictions such as maximum tension, minimum curvature radius and maximum stress are applied to verify the configurations’ feasibility. Only static analysis is performed.

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