Session: 01-06-01 CFD Modeling Practice & Verification

Paper Number: 102369

102369 - Numerical Study of Wind Loads and Experimental Validation for a Fpso Vessel Model 

Wind loads represent an important contribution to the design loads of large offshore structures during installation, normal operation and especially in extreme conditions. It affects stability of the floating structure and may have important safety implications during installation and operation.  Therefore, accurate prediction of wind loads on offshore structures is very critical to stability and efficiency of its operation.

Traditionally, the wind loads acting on offshore structures are measured experimentally in wind tunnels, but with rapid advance in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and ever-increasing computing power, it is possible to simulate wind flow around the offshore structure and calculate wind loads numerically. FPSO is one of the largest vessel in offshore industry, the complexities of its topside structures post a big challenge in reliable perdition of wind loads both with CFD modeling and in wind tunnel test.

In this study, we have conducted detailed CFD studies of wind flow over a generic FPSO model at both full scale and model scale of 1:400, including impact of different wind velocities and wind profiles. In model scale, the simulations are performed at the wind velocity of 10m/s and 20m/s, for all wind headings between 0 to 360 degrees with a step of 10 degrees. The calculated wind loads in the form of coefficients of three force components and three moment components are validate against experimental measurements. In addition to the overall wind loads on the FPSO, the static surface pressures at 28 sensor locations were also measured during wind tunnel test. In general, they are compared well with CFD simulation results.

For full-scale model, the CFD simulations are performed at different design wind speeds, the results confirmed the fully turbulent flow assumption and the scalability of wind loads at the model scale. The impact of wind profile shape is addressed in this paper as well.

The CFD simulation results and experiment data produced in this study constitute a good database to build and validate reduced order model (ROM) and data assimilation approaches, which is able to predict space-resolved wind loads on offshore superstructures in near real time

Presenting Author: Baili Zhang Institute of High Performance Computing

Presenting Author Biography: Principal Research Engineer
Fluid Dynamics
Institute of High Performance Computing
Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore

Authors:

Baili Zhang Institute of High Performance Computing
My Ha Dao Institute of High Performance Computing
Xiuqing Xing Institute of High Performance Computing
Jing Lou Institute of High Performance Computing
Wei Siang Tan National University of Singapore
Yongdong Cui National University of Singapore
Boo Cheong Khoo National University of Singapore