Recently offshore installations for the development of gas and oil resources have moved toward the deeper sea and harsher environment. In this regard, there are increasing operational demands for offshore structures performing in depth with long distance transportation. Drill ships are one of the representative structures commonly employed for the development of energy resources in deep sea. However, these drilling systems are exposed to the various loadings and harsh environment. Therefore, current design code and standards are very conservative to take account of such conditions. The riser stanchions for the staking the riser are one of the structure that installed on the riser deck platform of drill ship. In transit or operating conditions, the riser load is applied to the stanchion. Therefore, the required strength of stanchion enough to withstand the riser loads and should be designed to meet owner and classification requirements. However, the currently practice design loads, which has been widely used in the shipyard and manufacture industries are too conservative resulting in excessive structural weight. In this regard, the purpose of this study is to propose a rational calculation procedure for the design of cost effective and lightweight stanchion structures.
This study used a pyramid stacking type of arrangement for the investigation of the effects of stanchion by riser self-weight and hull acceleration. First, the riser loads based on the current conventional design practice is compared with the results obtained by non-linear finite element analysis. In the finite element simulation, contact and damping conditions of stacked risers are explicitly considered. Second, the calculation of riser loads in transverse direction is not easy due to the difficulty associated with considering transverse hull acceleration. Therefore, a new design guideline is presented in a strength calculation of the stanchion structure against to the estimated design loads.
