Fluid-Structure Interaction Modeling of a Subsea Jumper Pipe

Flow-induced vibration (FIV) is one of the main reasons for subsea piping failure, where subsea pipes, which typically carry multiphase flow, experience large fluctuating forces. These fluctuating forces can induce severe vibrations leading to premature piping failure. This paper presents a transient numerical study of a typical subsea M-shape jumper pipe that is carrying a gas-liquid multiphase flow subject to a slug frequency of 4.4 Hz, starting from rest to include the start-up effect as part of the study. 3-D numerical simulations were used to capture the fluid-structure interaction (FSI) and estimate pipe deformations due to fluctuating hydrodynamic forces. In this paper, two FSI approaches were used to compute the pipe deformations, two-way coupled and one-way decoupled. Analysis of the results showed that decoupled (one-way) FSI approach overestimated the peak pipe deformation by about 100%, and showed faster decay of fluctuations than coupled (two-way) FSI analysis. The assessment of resonant risk due to FIV is also discussed.