Nowadays, hybrid risers systems have been continuously adopted for deep and ultra-deep water petroleum fields. This riser system consists of a submersible buoy connected to flexible and rigid risers. Commonly, the buoy is installed 200 meters depth from the free surface to avoid the wave forces. Therefore, the main forces acting in this part of the system is due to the current flow. In this case, the VIM force is one of the forces that induce oscillations in the buoy, which can cause significantly fatigue damage to the riser system. In this scenario, understand the VIM response of the buoys is important for the system design. In this work, the semi-empirical approach presented by Tsukada et al. (2014), Numerical Simulation of VIM Response of a Submersible Buoy Using a Semi-Empirical Approach, OMAE2014–24187, is applied to perform a parametric study varying the riser length and the properties and dimensions of the buoy of a FSHR system. The main objective of this study is to show the trends of the response due to the variation of this parameters, which assists in understanding the real riser system response presented later in this paper. The real riser system properties and dimensions are obtained from the technical literature and used in the simulations. The results of amplitude and frequency of oscillation of the buoy are compatible with the results of FSHR model test experiments.

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